Monthly Archives: July 2026

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Pop-up Treatment Diary

I’m going to do an experiment in pop-up, temporary, newslettering.

I’m having radiotherapy treatment for prostate cancer over the next couple of weeks and I’m going to be writing about the experience in an email newsletter (subscription page).

I intend to write most days, but the main expected side-effect of the treatment is fatigue, and I’m already 7-months sleep-deprived from new fatherhood, so some days it will be short or just not happen.

In part it’s a way for me to let people know what’s happening without having to think too hard about who to add to a WhatsApp group or something.

I still need to write a “story so far” kind of intro, but as usual, I’m juggling the need to get something set up with the need to have some writing to share. I’m also working out how intimate and truthful it can be without being a gross-fest – I expect to be working on that throughout… but one of the problems with this kind of cancer is that many people with prostates don’t talk about their bodies and feelings the way that many people with breasts and ovaries tend to – and that includes me, so patience please.

It’s not a substack, please don’t call it a substack. For a start, it’s free – I have no interest in charging you for the privilege of reading more emails, especially emails that are all about me and my insides.

I’m also not tracking your “engagement” or capturing and selling your data and when this is all over I’ll be deleting whatever data gets collected.

Public comments won’t be enabled, but if you want to say “Hi!” then a one-line email reply would be lovely. Just because I’m not sure yet how much I’ll be able to process other than one-liners.

I have doubtless forgotten something vitally important in setting it up, I beg your indulgence… again…

Subscribe to “Zap! A Radiotherapy Diary”

PS the first unexpectedly difficult thing is finding images to use that aren’t either tear-jerky or just jerky or “woah dude! TMI!” – so have a path in the woods where you can’t quite see what’s round the corner… ?

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PC, my part in its downfall

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Personal Health News – Content Warning: references to prostate cancer and cancer treatments.

So another thing you might not know…

In the late summer of 2018, my GP recommended that I start having Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) blood tests. I was 53 and so obviously this was just a helpful thing to do to keep an eye on my health, given that my father had recently been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Obviously I didn’t have prostate cancer, I was in my early fifties and not experiencing any dramatic symptoms. Well, sod “obviously”, because after getting a relatively (but not scarily) high PSA reading, I had an MRI and a biopsy and the diagnosis was confirmed in the October.

I was fine. I’m still fine.

I went on to “active surveillance” which meant regular PSA tests (it’s moved up and down between 4 and 9 in that time), an MRI every other year and if there hadn’t been an NHS-busting pandemic, I’d have had another biopsy earlier than I did last year. I stayed in touch with the local Urology department (who are amazing, of course) and we continued to have conversations about the right treatment and the right timing.

The diagnosis came when we were at a point in our “fertility journey” where losing my ability to produce the required genetic material would have been annoying. And we didn’t know then that it would take until 2025 to produce our bundle of joy. So I probably stretched the qualification criteria for remaining on active surveillance – ie if we hadn’t been doing IVF, I would have had treatment sooner, but all the tests showed no cause for alarm and, as the urology nurse said when we told her Laura was pregnant, “the gamble paid off”.

I’m not necessarily recommending following my path here, but I want you to know that it wasn’t a standard path and remind you that its worth exploring all options. But that’s only possible if you keep talking sensibly to the professionals. If we already had Nuggy and I got the same diagnosis today that I got in 2018, I would be having treatment as soon as I could.

I only had one tricky conversation about the timeline, when I was allotted an antipodean surgical registrar for one of my catch-up appointments. He clearly thought I was being overly complacent and delivered the classic line “You’ve got cancer, mate!”, a phrase that I’ve adapted for my own use ever since when Laura was asking me about anything I wanted to get out of.

So later today I’m having a planning session at the RSCH Cancer Centre to prepare for radiotherapy (SABR) – I’ll share details as I feel appropriate here, but do get in touch if, as they say, you were affected by anything in this blogpost.

The preparation video they sent me is a hoot, with helpful diagrams of the human male urogenital system and how to pee in a urinal. I’ve never self-administered an enema before, so don’t say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

Oh and please put me in the “not a battle” category and refrain from military/conflict metaphors with me, I’m grateful for your encouragement (and prayers, prayers are OK!) if you want to share. And I know it’s hard because it’s still the mainstream way of thinking about cancer particularly, but I haven’t found it helpful for me.

My attitude has always been that I have a disease, science knows what to do, thank God for science.

People who have a prostate! Have a look at the current guidelines from the NHS. If you’re as old as I was when diagnosed and have a history of this stuff in your family – get tested and get help when you need it, please.

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Wednesday, 8th July 2026

These heatwaves are hard.

This one is not quite as bad as the last one, at least so far. I’m very drawn to Jay’s suggestion that we start naming heatwaves in a similar way to how we name storms. It’s tempting, if possibly counter-productive, to say that we should restrict the name pool to outspoken climate-deniers. I leave you to come up with your own suggestions. Anyway, the problem with the previous one was that it woke us up (sic) to the concept of “tropical nights”, which sounds like a spicy Harold Robbins paperback but is actually horrible when experienced in the reality of a British house built from heat-retaining brick, more than 100 years ago.

A “tropical night” (the scare quotes will continue until morale improves!) is one where the temperature overnight doesn’t go below 20ºC – turns out they also use the term “equatorial nights” to refer to those where the temp remains at 25ºC or above, but please, don’t encourage them (the Met Office? who comes up with these things?)

And then along with the childhood reminiscences of 1976 in the horrible bits of the media there’s the claim that the cold still kills far more people in the UK than the heat, which I’m sure is reassuring to people who’ve just lost a loved one to Heatwave Murgatroyd.

I probably wouldn’t have been moaning as much if we didn’t have a little one to look after. He was born in December and so his whole life we’ve been making sure that he’s warm enough and then suddenly we had to switch him to just a nappy at all times, with a vest on standby for if we’re lucky enough to *not* have a “tropical night”.

I got too agitated about it all on bsky one morning after no sleep and too much time spent reading North Americans saying “Let them eat A/C!”

Well that wasn’t a night I want to repeat… [looks at weather forecast… flushes head in toilet]

— Lloyd Davis (@lloyddavis.eurosky.social) 2026-06-25T06:27:01.097Z

It’s currently too hot to work out a better way of embedding the whole thread, as if anyone’s interested…

I also spent far too much time watching the weather radar on windy.com as storm after storm just missed Godalming. A couple of nights I saw lightning on the horizon, but we didn’t get any real rain for days and still haven’t had a good downpour.

Now that we’re into Heatwave Norman I don’t even have that luxury/idiocy – there’s no rain to be seen on the forecast at all. We’ve settled into our minor adaptations of blackout blinds in the bedroom and a rota of opening and closing windows according to the time of day, staying hydrated and getting sleep when we can. Bigger adaptations are going to be needed. I just don’t know what, when and how.

Anyway.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking/writing about what I want to do next in what I can only call my “public life”, in the light of both getting older and having a new small person. It’s taking shape. One of the insights has been that my theory of change is quite different from many of the people I spend time with and that rather than picking holes in what they believe, I need to articulate and refine better what I think. So I’m doing that. But it’s not ready to splurge about yet.

But this morning I updated the invitation to Living Culture Coffee Mornings with some of that in mind. It now reads:

​I believe that we’re called to help build a more equal, loving, tolerant, peaceful society – one that can melt away selfishness, hate and conflict.

​I also believe that this only really happens when people talk through and work on things together as peers.

​And my experience has been that, while there are some amazing and heart-burstingly joyous examples of this happening, in general people (yes I am people too!) still need lots of practice to talk or work together well.

These conversations are one contribution to an idea that’s gaining favour around here. Dougald and Anna have called it “regrowing a living culture” and I thought that was peachy, so here we are.

​You don’t have to come knowing what a living culture is or have any idea how to start regrowing one. That’s exactly what we’ll be talking about, with the hope that by doing so together, we’re getting started on a simple path of regrowth.

​You can also breathe a sigh of relief that I won’t be lecturing you on the subject! You may not be surprised to find that many of the conversations we have take a spiritual (but not necessarily religious) tone.

Everyone is welcome, but you do need to sign up. There is no homework and no qualification for attendance except an interest in chatting about this stuff.

You don’t have to be there for the whole thing if it’s inconvenient for you this time – “arriving late” or “leaving early” have no meaning here. There will be time to share announcements at 11am (remind me!)

So yeah, that feels better. Next one is online on Friday 10th. Subscribe to the calendar to get invitations as they come out.