As a Fellow Cancer Sufferer, My Heart Goes Out to Jade Goody. But the Circus Surrounding Her Last Days Is Like the Ghoulish Spectacle of a Public Hanging ; a Provocative View From an International Political Journalist... [Eire Region]

Summary

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IT BEGAN, as it does for so many others, with a lump. A small, seemingly innocuous noggin of flesh that grew in the side of my neck. I noticed it first last October, at the end of a particularly gruelling political party conference season which I had been covering for the BBC.

A stress lump, I thought carelessly.

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As a Fellow Cancer Sufferer, My Heart Goes Out to Jade Goody. But the Circus Surrounding Her Last Days Is Like the Ghoulish Spectacle of a Public Hanging ; a Provocative View From an International Political Journalist... [Eire Region]

An enlarged gland telling me I had worked too hard, drunk too much and slept too little.

But the little thing had staying power, so I went to my GP. There followed a month of tests and consultations that ended with an ear, nose and throat specialist carving open my neck to remove a sample for the microscope slide.

The results confirmed that the offending piece of gristle was teeming with more cancerous cells than one would normally want.

I had, the doctors informed me, something called diffuse large B- cell non-Hodgkins lymphoma. To you and m...

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