Another cancer blog. Except, despite my widely known enthusiasm for the colour, I don’t have the pretty pink cancer. Oh no – I have bowel cancer – the cancer that dare not speak its name!

Aged 34, eleven weeks after the birth of my first child, I was diagnosed with bowel cancer which had silently spread to my liver, rendering most of it cancerous. There was general speculation that I had about 6 months.

We’re now three months on from diagnosis and seven chemo cycles. I think I’ll be here for a while yet and so does my oncologist.

So I’ve done the obvious and set up a blog. Hopefully my friends and family will find it a useful insight into our experiences. Some of these things are too hard to talk about, but easier to write down and probably easier to read rather than hear.

The name of this blog comes from a Paulo Coelho quote which is quite ironic as I actually hate his books. An ex gave me a copy of The Alchemist and I tried so hard to like it but I just didn’t. But I came across this quote today and it seemed a perfect articulation of the light and the dark that constitutes my life at the moment:

“At every moment of our lives, we all have one foot in a fairy tale and the other in the abyss.”
― Paulo Coelho