The generosity of French doctors

My last NHS scan showed a shadow on a rib. The scan report couldn’t decide between a new cancer metastasis or scarring from an old injury. The first would mean the cancer had moved into my skeleton and was on a winning streak. I have fractured ribs in sharp collisions with steering wheels more than once and cling strenuously to the old-scar hypothesis.

The image showed a second suspicious blur. Something, possibly a tumour, was putting pressure on my left kidney. Since then I’ve been going around with a length of plastic tube inserted in my urethra to drain it. Until that point my cancer was just a word. Now an occasional throb or ache there reminds me forcibly of my destructibility. More recently, my prostate-specific antigen score, measured by a blood test, which had been beaten down into the normal range by a daily pill, has risen sharply, strongly indicating that the cancer has its boots on.

All of which is as intensely boring to me as it no doubt is to you. But last week this combination of fact and speculation had to be marshalled and presented articulately to a urologist at a Marseille university teaching hospital who had offered to find half an hour in his busy day to hear my case.

After two years of tentative maleness, I must now transition to being a female again

Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have troubled him. But I had run out of tablets and my oncologist back in the UK suggested, via a telephone call, that I get restarted on anti-hormone injections. Back in 2013 my cancer treatment had begun with these injections. Turning me into a woman made the cancer retreat, saving my life. After two years I was tentatively allowed to return to maleness. Now that the cancer has reasserted itself I must transition again.