Tomorrow I have my regular three-monthly-ish post-cancer outpatients appointment – the first one in almost two years that will be face-to-face rather than on the phone. Back in September I had an annual CT scan to make sure everything is still OK and I have spent the last three or four months happy because I hadn’t heard anything from anybody. I always figure that if they found anything nasty they would get in touch and not wait until the next regular appointment. Basically I work on the assumption that no news is good news.

This morning I had a call asking where I had the scan done because they haven’t seen the results. This is not entirely surprising because it happened before and is a consequence of me electing to get the scans done at my local hospital and not go all the way to Guildford for it. The trouble is that it is a different trust and they don’t seem to do anything with the results pro-actively.

Cue 24 hours of panic. I am actually 99.9% confident that it will be all clear again, but somehow that 0.1% manages to take hold of the pessimistic part of my brain, probably because the whole sequence of chemotherapy, operations and recovery was so traumatic that any doubt triggers a sort of PTSD. I am seriously thinking that next year I will make the one-hour journey to Guildford for a five-minute scan just to avoid all this stress.