Greetings one and all and apologies for an overdue blog post but I’ve had a rather busy week writing that next novel of mine and I know how eager you all are for it.

Yeah, right!

Anyway, I’ve done four days’ worth of it and the word count is a little over 10,000 so progress indeed.

Now then, on to business.

On the 21^st of January I posted a blog about my weight loss and whatnot and in that blog I mentioned that I had had a considerable shock and that there would be challenges ahead for the Stevenson household.

Well, I now feel in a sufficient place to explain what I meant by that. The short version is that Ange, my lovely, nay beautiful, wife who I adore the very bones of has had cancer.

Yes, that horrible, horrible, shitty little C word that seems to have impacted every family on the face of the Earth at some point has visited Blessham Hall and grown it’s disgusting self into my darling good lady. The good news, however, is that it has been caught early and is being treated by our incredibly wonderful and utterly gorgeous NHS.

Ange noticed a lump in her left breast shortly before Christmas following a walking netball accident where she collided with the wall after catching the ball, would you believe? Her GP sent her swiftly to Airedale hospital where it was confirmed, after a mammogram and other tests, to be cancerous. That was in early January. Hence my feelings of shock and dumbfoundedness at the time.

On 14^th of February (yes, Valentine’s Day) Ange went in for an operation where a lumpectomy was performed and the tumour and lymph nodes removed. I don’t know how it must have felt for Ange but it was one of the longest days of my life waiting for news from the hospital.

But, thank God, the operation was a success and Ange returned home the same day.

True to form I managed to balls things up by pushing her down a corridor in a wheelchair with the handbrake on but the least said about that the better. I called myself all the berks under the Sun for that one. I’m just glad no-one else noticed.

Since then Ange has been recuperating at home and is still quite emotional and prone to bouts of feeling really very poorly. But, not withstanding, she is making excellent progress nonetheless and we are going back to the hospital on Tuesday for a follow up to the operation where the next stage of the treatment will be discussed.

The brilliant news is that Ange won’t have to undergo chemotherapy, which she was dreading, and instead will have sessions of radiotherapy at St James’s Hospital in Leeds.

One amazing thing that has come out of this for me is just how courageous my wife is. I’ve always known that she is kind, warm, generous, funny, inclusive, caring, welcoming and loving. But until now I never realised just how brave she is as well. She’ll tell you herself that throughout this whole episode she has been absolutely terrified but who wouldn’t be? The fact is she’s faced it all with good humour and a determination to beat it and my, already high, admiration of her has increased as a result.

There’s still a long way to go but Ange and I are prepared for the challenges and will face them together as husband and wife as is right and proper and I’ll keep you updated from time to time.

So that’s just a very brief explanation of what’s been going on. There’s been a lot of tears and a good many sleepless nights during the last couple of months and if I were to go into precise details it would require me to write a whole book on it. But anyone who has battled this awful disease will know what I’m talking about.

As a conclusion I’d like to say that the NHS should be the envy of the whole world and I can’t thank them enough for their rapid, professional and sensitive intervention at this time in our lives. I can’t remember at what point during the pandemic that we stopped clapping for the NHS but damn and blast it we shouldn’t have stopped at all. We should be out there every night applauding them until our hands ache from over use. And what’s more, the hapless, hopeless, dishonest liars that run this country should be pouring ten times the amount of money into our hospitals as what they currently are but see fit to waste it elsewhere.

The NHS saved my life in 2003 when I was quite literally at death’s door and moments away from joining the old choir invisible. I owe my life to them and now they’ve taken that vile lump out of the person I love the most in this world and given us both hope for the future.

God bless the NHS and long may they continue.