In June 2014 I received a diagnosis of stage IV bowel cancer with metastatic tumours in my liver and lungs. My first reaction on hearing the diagnosis was to begin text messaging the news to my friends and family. These text messages remain in my phone, and I look over them sometimes to remind myself that yes, I do have cancer. I spoke to my mum, my sister, and my closest few friends, in shocked, monosyllabic bursts, before logging in to Facebook to announce, in a long and ugly post, the fact that the tumours in my liver, which I had already been writing about, were cancer.

From the beginning of the diagnostic process, I have used words as a tool I have to shape, frame and reframe my ideas around cancer. My cancer seems abstract to me. My diagnostic narrative is one I find I must repeat frequently in order to make it substantial. It goes like this: I suffered from mild nausea for two years, which I had attributed to a common side effect of a drug I am on, called Lamotrigine, an anticonvulsant that treats both my temporal lobe epilepsy and bipolar disorder. The nausea got worse over this two-year period, and in May 2014 my GP ordered an abdominal and pelvic ultrasound to check for upper gastrointestinal tract issues that might have been contributing. The ultrasound revealed six to eight very large tumours, including one that was ten centimetres in diameter, in my liver. According to the medical language in the paperwork, the ‘tumours’ were in fact lesions, a word more alien and mysterious than tumours, and yet somehow safer. For three weeks three doctors told me that there was almost no chance that these lesions were cancerous. After a long list of tests—two upper abdominal liver MRIs, two CT scans and an endoscopy—a biopsy was ordered to confirm the suspicion that they were a type of benign liver tumour known as a focal nodular hyperplasia (FNH).