This boy's life: Fighting Cancer with words

Part One: Sperm

I awoke with a jolt of excitement today. I heard my door open, and through bleary eyes I saw my mother coming into the room with an envelope in her outstretched arm. What could this be? A wistful letter of love from an old flame? A massive order for Jamie Ross charity wristbands? Of course not, it was a letter from my old mates at the sperm bank.

I don't know how you like to start your day, but I'd venture that very few of you would choose to wake up by receiving a letter directly from the desk of a sperm nurse which, in its very first sentence, informs you that you have a "slightly low sperm count".

A month ago, just after I was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma (cancer of the lymph nodes), I had to give a sperm sample due to the small chance that six months of treatment could make me infertile. I don't know who invented chemotherapy, but his efforts to iron out the flaws in his creation can only really be described as lacklustre. If he went on Dragons' Den he'd no doubt present something revolutionary and fantastic, much like Reggae Reggae sauce, but it would probably cause eight of your toes to fall off and make the earth explode.

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Apparently, having a slightly below average count is of little consequence to me, but they thought I'd get a kick out of this emasculating piece of trivia anyway. They claim that it is "most likely" down to my illness, which reads to me as a thinly veiled suggestion that I have rubbish testicles. However, I am reassuringly told that they have "great motility", which means that, although perhaps low in number, they are a force to be reckoned with. Much like the Spartan army.

They go on to instruct me that I have to contact them as soon as I enter a serious relationship so that they can sort out the relevant consent forms for it. This raises the question; how in shitting crikey am I supposed to bring this up with the lucky lady? At what stage in a relationship is it acceptable for me to suggest that her name should be written on my bottle of sperm?

This also means that somewhere in Ninewells Hospital, Dundee, there will be an inevitably long and depressing record of each successive failed relationship that I have had to cancel consent for. Perhaps the sperm receptionist will moonlight as a handy relationship counsellor for me.

"Oh dear, what happened this time, Jamie?"

"Same as last time, Doreen, I told her I needed her date of birth and address to fill out the form for her to mother my test-tube spawn."

In the final paragraph they inform me that I don't have Aids, which was a relief. I think that finding out that I had both cancer and Aids in the same month would have been somewhat of a bitter pill to swallow. Anyway, it was on that bombshell that the letter ended and I was left to pick over the prospect of living my life knowing I make slightly less sperm than a normal man, but it's OK because they could have Aids.

Part Two: Hair

Upon any diagnosis of a serious health problem, you'll be given an entire rainforest's worth of information leaflets. I assume that the main purpose of these is to put a patient's mind at ease in a worrying time but, in my case, this was a spectacular failure, for two reasons. First, being given a list of local funeral directors and will-writers is not a precursor to a relaxing night's sleep. Second, upon reading the infinite list of possible treatment side-effects, I saw "complete or partial hair loss" casually tossed in among insignificant things such as heart failure or lung damage.

Any person that has ever given me so much as a fleeting glance will realise that this is the single worst thing that could possibly happen to me. I've never made a secret of my vanity – I've often been mocked for my vast hairspray collection, and I used to spend countless mornings persuading my Mum to write a sick note for the previous day of school because I was having a bad hair day and refused to go in.

However, now it appears that such callous actions have blown up in my face in the form of karma-induced hair loss. Of course, some doctors may tell you that it's down to an awful drug slowly but surely destroying almost every cell in my body, but they'd say anything to sound like they know something that a common man doesn't. It's almost definitely karma pixies pulling it out strand by strand with maniacal glee, teaching me tiny lesson after tiny lesson.

My nurse has said that it would be unusual for me to lose my hair completely, but I should be "prepared for some thinning", which I thought was a terrifyingly vague statement. Will I end up as the first 19-year-old in history to adopt a comb-over? Also, if this is true and I do have some of my original hair at the end, I'll surely have two very different lengths of ridiculous hair when what I have lost begins to grow back. Plus, new hair can apparently be a completely different colour to the original, so I could easily end up looking like an incredibly shit and low-budget Batman villain.

I've voiced these concerns with my nursing team, which often leads to hilarious jokes about my vanity. They just don't understand why my hair is so important, stupidly believing that I'd be more concerned with overcoming cancer than whether I look sexy on the ward. But who knows who I could meet? A woman under 93 has to enter the haematology unit at some point and, when the day comes, I'll be prepared to pounce.

Part Three: God

People react in several different ways when you tell them that you have a form of cancer. Most people react in a tactful manner, sending a nice message of support and sympathy. Some people, mostly annoying idiots, become upset. Then there are the people who react by laughing due to my oft-controversial humour in the past leading them to think that I'm joking, but this is often followed by a certain degree of guilt.

However, the worst people by far are those who think that the single thing that I need most at this troubling time is the power of prayer. It's true to say that there are few graver dangers that cancer patients face than the prospect of becoming a born-again Christian.

Religions always try to get people when they're down. If they're not hassling cancer patients like myself they're after the homeless, people just released from prison and recovering alcoholics. This is why the Vatican is in direct competition with the makers of The Jeremy Kyle Show. Viewers of the show will be familiar with Kyle's catchphrase "wear a condom!" which he frequently screams at teenage parents. This is not, however, the handy family-planning advice it appears to be – it is an involuntary outburst of defiance against his main rival, the Catholic Church.

Don't get me wrong. I firmly believe that everyone should have the right to believe in and practise whatever religion they choose to follow, whether it be Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam, Sikhism and all those other things I haven't given a second thought to since compulsory Religious Education in school.

However, a few people have told me that they've been praying specifically for me in church. I don't quite know what to make of this. While I really do appreciate any form of well-wishing, this created visions of a giant picture of my smiling face at the front of the church being doused with holy water while a bearded man in a colourful jumper sings songs about me accompanied by his acoustic guitar, which would most likely be plastered with "Jesus Rocks!" stickers. My second name rhymes with cross, the song pretty much writes itself.

In my eyes, there appears to be only one beneficiary of these acts – namely, God himself. I'm either going to make a full recovery or, by a reassuringly unlikely stroke of spectacularly bad luck, not. In one of these cases people will believe that God has graciously come to my aid and celebrate his amazing healing ability; in the other, God has ignored the prayers and has mercilessly let me perish, meaning everyone will congregate and sing loads of hymns about what an ace guy he is. Is it just me, or is skulduggery afoot? It appears that this sly God character has placed himself in a win-win situation and I shan't stand for it.

Surely Christians should introduce some sort of deity evaluation system so this loophole cannot be sinisterly abused again? This would certainly be one of my first actions as Pope, immediately after introducing a better hat.

Part Four: Ultrasound

It's been somewhat of a bumper week in terms of hospital visits for your intrepid cancerous reporter. The first three days of my week were filled with a veritable cocktail of hospitalising adventures, including passing the halfway milestone in my treatment, getting a CT scan and, finally, undergoing the altogether degrading spectacle of a testicular ultrasound scan.

The main outcome of these experiences is the revelation that I'm growing tired of aging men gazing upon my naked form. It's got to the stage when I think it would be preferable if they sent me to Nuts magazine studios for a day to undergo a risqué photo-shoot of me in various playful poses, and then distributed copies to the members of my medical team to prevent me from having to get completely Billy Bollocks in a hospital ever again. No doubt the penny-pinching NHS would fancifully claim that transforming me into a glamour model would be a waste of taxpayers' money though, only in this bloody country...

The tell-tale signs that it was going to be a demoralising ordeal struck me right in the face from the very beginning. Swaggering into the busy reception area thinking I was the cat's pyjamas, I shook out my headphones, which were playing some loud rock'n'roll music, and approached the attractive young receptionist to tell her that I had an appointment at 2.10pm. "Jamie Ross... a testicular ultrasound isn't it?" – a deafening silence immediately fell upon the waiting room. At this point, 20 people shared a moment of looking at me out of the corner of their eyes and thinking: "I wonder what's wrong with his balls?" Having been firmly put in my place, I quietly nodded and sat down to read Bella magazine in a desperate attempt to avoid the gaze of every single person in the room.

I was called through after about 20 minutes of reading about Fern Britton's dieting tips. The magazine was dated March 2008; little did we know what an outrageous, lying Antichrist she was at the time. I was told to remove all of my clothes and replace them with a hospital gown that reached down to the midway point of my thigh, making sitting down in the waiting room for a further five minutes after changing a somewhat perilous experience.

After experimenting with a series of leg-crossing manoeuvres, I was beckoned through to a small, darkened room by a rather dour-looking Frenchman and told to lay down on the slab. It was only upon turning round that I realised, to my utter horror, that there were a further two people in the room looking on – both of them nurses only slightly older than me. What the purpose of them being there except to make me feel incredibly self-conscious about my genitalia still, to this moment, remains a mystery. Anyway, picture the romantic scene – the lights were dimmed, my dress was flirtatiously raised to my belly and a gelatinous substance was smeared all over my balls as the procedure began.

When I find myself in situations that unnerve me, I tend to try and make funny jokes. More often than not, these jokes just come out as an indecipherable noise and people shuffle about uncomfortably to pretend that they didn't hear it. However, on this occasion, I had prepared a cracking line for my testicular ultrasound man and was absolutely certain that it would be a resounding success. With a little confident chuckle in my voice as he moved his ultrasound stick around my spanglers, I quipped: "So, do I get a little picture to take home and show my family, like pregnant women do?" At worst, I expected this to be greeted with a sympathetic smirk considering that I was an inoffensive, 19-year-old, cancer-ridden boy undergoing possibly the most embarrassing medical procedure imaginable. What I got was a straightforward, steely "no". A cold silence plagued the rest of the procedure as the two nurses, still inexplicably in the room, looked on. It had gone down like a shit sandwich.

It took about 20 horribly uncomfortable minutes in total, with the only conversation being: "Can you push as hard as you can, as if you were going to the toilet?" Letting out a colossal fart would have just been the icing on the cake of the whole horrendous ordeal, but luckily this didn't come to pass. The procedure mercifully ended, I was handed a tissue to clean myself up with and one of the nurses pointed towards a bin for me to dispose of it. This crucial intervention obviously immediately justified her and her mate being present during the entire unfolding debacle.

I scuttled out of the room to get changed, never to return. This experience has shattered the myth that the "ultra sound" people are the coolest people in the hospital, as the rubbish joke goes; in actual reality they hate all forms of high jinks and merry-making.

Part Five: Sick

The past fortnight can only be described as an interminable nightmare. After spending a vast proportion of my recent time boastfully lording it over other cancer patients due to me feeling tip-top, the Cancer Fairy finally took it upon himself to mercilessly beat me into the ground with his giant stick of misery. I couldn't even expend the energy to write a blog last week, but I finally managed to haul my laptop open through fear that people might assume that I've actually died. The good news is that I'm still very much alive. The bad news is that I've barely been able to stand up for 20 seconds without becoming nonsensically out of breath and I currently feel like I'm pregnant with pure, unadulterated evil.

The problem arose around this time last week when I was diagnosed with a chest infection. I had been feeling a tad below par for about a week before and I had considered phoning up my ward to tell them that exact fact. However, I'm never quite certain how bad I have to feel to phone up a ward that deals almost exclusively in chemotherapy without fear of being greeted with derision. As a general rule, chemotherapy patients aren't as happy-go-lucky and effervescent as you may assume. If I had phoned up to tell them that I felt "a tad below par" it may have been pointed out that I had been having intensive cancer treatment for about four months, and then I might have felt a bit silly. So, having allowed my fear of very slight social embarrassment to exacerbate my condition for a few days, I awoke with a raging temperature and was hurried along to Perth Royal Infirmary.

I wasn't particularly worried about this. I had been told to expect all manner of infections here and there due to the fact that I currently have the immune system of a small HIV-positive insect. However, there's something about having six visibly concerned medical professionals gathered around you that makes you question what they know that you don't. After much deliberation, they decided that I'd need to spend at least two nights getting constant antibiotics through a drip at Ninewells Hospital.

This news whipped up scant enthusiasm within me. I had been to Ninewells a few times before and each visit appears to be more emotionally crippling than the last. If I'm not getting told that I have cancer, I'm visiting dying relatives, getting my neck sliced open or ejaculating into a tiny pot in a cold, lonely room. If something goes wrong in my life, Ninewells almost always rears its ugly head as the grim setting. It is to me as the Führerbunker is to Adolf Hitler.

Arriving at Ninewells' haematology unit, I couldn't help but notice that there was a tantalising selection of whisky, gin and other spirits on a tray next to the massive TV. I don't know why Dundonian cancer patients require a minibar but I felt comforted by the fact that, if my boredom was to reach dangerous levels, I could always get off my mash and stomp around the corridors after midnight – most likely wearing nothing but a vast array of medical paraphernalia. After 20 full minutes of fantasising about this possibility, I was ushered into a small room by a young female doctor who looked uncannily like Geri Halliwell to learn my grim fate. "Can I come?" asked my mother. Doctor Spice looked at me and whispered: "Do you know her?" – evidently thinking that she was an insane drifter woman desperate to latch on to a complete stranger's medical consultation.

Bracing myself to be told that one and a half of my lungs had fallen off, the Doctor tapped me on the chest a few times, made me breathe a bit and then shooed me away home with a big sack of drugs to keep me happy. I didn't quite know how to react – what had she missed that my Perth doctors were so gravely concerned about? Also, while it was obviously a relief that I didn't have to spend the night in the same room as four terminally ill and incontinent old men, I couldn't help but feel slightly aggrieved that the decision to stick a giant needle in the back of my hand in preparation for intravenous antibiotics had proven overenthusiastically premature. Anyway, I removed such trivial matters from my head and skipped away home, reassured that I am, in fact, indestructible.

In hindsight, I think that a night or two in hospital may have been preferable to this fortnight of utter misery caused by the unholy alliance of antibiotic tablets and chemotherapy. I've felt preposterously ill, all the while waking up to people's Facebook status updates about how rough they felt because they threw caution to the wind and had an extra Sourz Apple the previous night. I would have crawled through a tunnel woven together from shards of glass, out-turned salt and vinegar crisp packets and pig faeces to have experienced just five minutes of a glorious hangover this week. You people don't know you're born.

Read Jamie Ross's blog at http://cancerouscapers.blogspot.com

Voices from the frontline: Other cancer diaries

Adrian Sudbury

Adrian Sudbury was a reporter for a local newspaper in Huddersfield. In November 2006, the 25-year-old was diagnosed with two distinct types of leukaemia at the same time. According to the medical literature, he was the only person in the world to have this condition and he chronicled his condition on a blog called Baldy's Blog. He died on 20 August 2008.

Sudbury had campaigned for better education about bone marrow donation, taking a petition of 11,000 signatures to Downing Street and inspiring the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, to write to celebrities to raise awareness of the campaign.

Deborah Hutton

Deborah Hutton, the first health editor of British 'Vogue', died on 15 July 2005 of lung cancer. She was 49. A non-smoker for 24 years, she was annoyed by the stigma attached to the disease, the idea that "people bring it upon themselves". Her book, 'What Can I Do To Help?', which offered advice to family and friends of the seriously ill, was published shortly before her death.

Ivan Noble

The BBC online science and technology writer was diagnosed with a brain tumour in August 2002, and kept a "tumour diary" on the BBC's website until his last entry on 30 January 2005. He died just a day later, aged 37.

John Diamond

Journalist and broadcaster John Diamond was diagnosed with cancer in 1997, and used his column in 'The Times' to document his experiences. He also took part in a BBC documentary, which followed him over months of harrowing treatments. He died on 2 March 2001, leaving his wife Nigella Lawson and two young children.

Lindsay Nicholson

The former editor of 'Good Housekeeping' has written movingly about her breast cancer, diagnosed in 2007 – and about the deaths of her husband and young daughter, both from leukaemia, in a memoir, 'Living on the Seabed' (Vermilion, £7.99). With her own diagnosis, Lindsay decided to take her writing online and blog for the magazine she'd edited for so long.

Ruth Picardie

Diagnosed with breast cancer in October 1996, within a few months journalist Ruth Picardie had to face the fact that the cancer had spread to her bones, lungs, liver and brain – which she did in public, through her account of her experiences in a column for 'The Observer'. These were collected into a book, 'Before I Say Goodbye' (Penguin), together with her e-mails to friends and accounts of her last days from her husband and sister.

Oscar Moore

Oscar Moore spent the last three years of his life writing with unflinching honesty about his gradual decline due to AIDS, in a column called "PWA (Person With Aids)" for The Guardian. He had been HIV positive for 13 years - his entire writing career - and died aged 36, on 12 September 1996. A collection of his work, PWA: Looking AIDS in the Face (Picador, £6.99), was published the same year.

Hodgkin's disease: The Facts

Hodgkin's disease – or Hodgkin lymphoma – is a cancer of the lymphatic system, which helps to defend the body against infection. Lymphatic organs (such as bone marrow, tonsils and lymph nodes) are connected by tiny vessels, which carry infection-fighting white blood cells around the body.

Hodgkin's lymphoma usually occurs in a group of lymph nodes in one area of the body, most frequently those in the neck, although it can start in lymph glands under the arms, in the groin, chest or abdomen, or within body organs.

Although Hodgkin's disease is most common in young people in their twenties, anyone can develop the disease.

Treatment for Hodgkin's disease has a high success rate – up to 95 per cent, depending on the stage of the cancer and the age of the patient. The majority of sufferers can be cured, or the lymphoma can be kept under control for long periods of time.

Chemotherapy – the use of anti-cancer drugs to disrupt the growth of lymphoma cells – is usually the main treatment. Radiotherapy, in which high-energy rays are targeted to destroy the cancer cells, may also be used.

Swelling of the lymph nodes in the neck, armpit or groin is often the first symptom. Other common symptoms include high temperatures, weight loss and sweating.

While the cause of the disease is unknown, poor immunity may increase the chances of developing Hodgkin's disease, as may the Epstein-Barr virus, which causes glandular fever.

Holly Williams

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