Blaggers blog

Hello,

you can probably tell by that masculine "Hello" that this isn't Rosemary writing this, although neither am I just some arbitary blogjacking bloke. My name is Dave and I am one of the people Rosemary is running the Race of Life for.

I could tell early on that Rosemary needed some help with her training, so I got cancer in order to motivate her a little which seemed to do the trick.

I was diagnosed with a tumour on my kidney in early May, but before the month was over both the cancer and the kidney were gone and I'd been given the all clear.

Whilst this is great news on a personal level, obviously it has connotations for Rosemary's training regime, So I felt duty bound to travel to equitorial Wiltshire to oversee her programme for myself which seems to me to consist mainly of white wine and shoe shops.

I have tried to impart some advice which in true Rosemary style has been roundly ignored, so I have succumbed to the old maxim, "You can always tell a Norland girl, but you can't tell her much." It turns out that the real reason for luring me down here for the weekend was not in fact to help put the finishing touches to both her training and Steve's Jack Daniels but to be coerced into writing her blog for her.

I am a bit of a virgin at blogging (in so far as it's possible to be a bit of a virgin) so you'll have to excuse the unprofessionalism, but here is my story.



I was born at a very early age, and then 43 years later I got cancer. Actually I never had cancer, but my kidney did. There is still a belief in this country that cancer = death, I suppose I am testament to that not being true.

I was lucky. Everybody told me so, and at first I found it difficult to juxtapose the two words, lucky and cancer, they go together like horse and fromage frais as far as I could see, but then I came around: I was lucky to have found the tumour so quickly, lucky to be relatively young, lucky that it was confined to an organ which has a spare, lucky to be living in the area I do, and lucky that the operation could be performed by keyhole surgery. I was so lucky in fact that I named the tumour "Lucky" on the basis that if it were a dog with that name it was bound to get knocked down on the A46.
I lost Lucky on May 25th and came out of hospital three days later. (Went back in after a couple of ays with an infecton, but that's all acqdemic now.)
It is now two weeks since my operation, I'm sitting in Rosemary's garden, high on life, friendship and the consequences of testing out my remaining kidney with Steve's wine cellar. One of the first things I did after getting the all clear was to get my hair cut (I refused to waste £8 in case I had to have chemotherapy) and to get out and see people. I can't begin to tell you how good life is, and how good it is to know there are people like Rosemary and Julie who are prepared to go through this rigorous training routine(!) on behalf of people they don't necessarily know.
I'm aware how lucky I am, and even more aware that not everyone gets my luck. If I could share it out I would, but I know I can't which is why I feel so humbled by the efforts of Rosemary, Julie and everyone who Runs for Life. So thank you to everybody who has sponsored anybody for next Sunday's event, and good luck to everyone taking part, especially to Rosemary who was supposed to have my face as her spur to cross the finishing line, but who now probably won't bother. Go Ro Go.