I’m not dying of cancer. I’m living with it – Susan Morrison

The Edinburgh Cancer Centre is an outstanding medical facility with a waiting area apparently modelled on the reception desk of the 1980s’ Crossroads Motel.
Modern scanning techniques can help surgeons find and remove tumours (Picture: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)Modern scanning techniques can help surgeons find and remove tumours (Picture: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Modern scanning techniques can help surgeons find and remove tumours (Picture: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

No matter, the NHS has more important things to be spending its money on than decor. Get that staff paid properly.

My fantastic oncologist waved me in with a cheery “hullo!” instead of shouting my name out, like all the other specialists do. It’s very chummy, but I was mildly miffed. I like being announced. It’s a bit of theatre.

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I was there to ask questions and she was there, it seemed, to take all the time in the world to allay my anxieties, chiefly my belief that stage four cancer was a sure-fire, rapid-action death sentence.

Probably got that idea from the telly. Soap operas love that plot twist. You know the scene. It’s a moment of great family celebration. The terrible words are blurted out, “it’s spread”. Episode ends on a tight shot to the face. Cue Eastenders’ ‘doof doof’ music.

Next week, the funeral, unspoken family secrets spill, there’s a fist fight and someone is revealed to be the departed’s secret wife/husband/twin brother. Possibly all three. But in the real world, it’s not like that, not for everyone.

Admittedly, not so long ago, even the medics thought that people who had tumours in their livers and lungs were best just made comfortable and handed a good book to read. Not a long one.

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Now they can peer into your body with machines like CTs, MRIs and the massive PET scanner, which is basically what happens when a CT loves an MRI and they have a baby. They can see with incredible clarity where the little devils are hiding. Surgeons can literally boldly go where no scalpel has gone before for some serious tumour battle action.

Even if the surgeons look at the scans, purse their lips and say “oooo mebbe not”, there are options, said my lovely oncologist. There’s a treatment called stereotactic ablative radiotherapy, or SABR, to its friends. You just know that some team somewhere danced a little jig of joy when they came up with that acronym.

SABR is highly concentrated radiotherapy. It blasts tumours. I hope it looks like the laser beams Bond villains used to demand money with menaces, but experience has taught me it's probably a pretty boring-looking bit of kit operated by a charming girl called Kirsty.

This particular SABR machine lives in Glasgow, under the care of the Beatson Institute. Worry not, I assured my lovely oncologist, I am by birth a Glaswegian. Under certain circumstances, I can unleash an accent that can strip paint off a Volvo at 50 paces. I still pass as a Weegie.

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SABR is not alone, although not all new treatments have a funky nickname. CAR-T and HIPEC are still a bad Scrabble hand, but who cares as long as they take down cancer ASAP? Even more incredibly, sometimes they can fight this thing to a standstill.

Of course, I only partly believed her. Oh, I know she has qualifications and degrees and all that, but it's a shock to the system to discover that medical experts like Eastenders are wrong. I’m not dying of cancer. I’m living with it.

And thousands more are, every day.

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