Ifelt an actual breeze flutter, blowing my hair. The consultant had told me he was confident I had throat cancer that had spread into the lymph glands. Joyfully, I held his hand, and looked up to the heavens like a South American footballer after scoring a goal. It was one of the happiest moments of my life. Around the middle of June, while I was shaving, I had noticed that one side of my neck was looking much bigger than normal. I had to look from several angles before I believed the mirror – the first thought, when you notice a large abnormality on your body, is to assume the mind has made a mistake. Maybe the reflection is distorted by an eclipse of the moon or the northern lights, or maybe I’ve confused my left gland with my thigh. I Googled “Why is one side of my neck suddenly much larger than the other?” Most of the answers suggested there’s nothing to worry about “unless it hasn’t gone down after two weeks”. After two weeks I told myself it had sort of gone down, in that it was only a bit bigger. I made an appointment with the doctor and the following week I was in his office, talking in the blokey way that men talk to doctors: “I’m sure it’s nothing, I’m sorry for coming.” He felt my neck and throat and said he’d book a scan at the hospital. Then I went off to play football. Nearly two weeks later, having heard nothing, I rang the hospital, heard a long message about Covid, pressed 3, then 1, then 6, then 9, was cut off and eventually spoke to a jolly radiologist who asked me to “come in on Sunday morning, darling, we’ll find a slot for you”. So, on a Sunday, I lay on a blue plastic bench where they covered my neck in sticky jelly and she placed a machine on my throat that looked like an electric shaver from the 70s. And in the next moment, everything changed. She stared at the screen like an actor in a soap opera at the end of an episode. “It’s very enlarged,” she said. “It’s very uneven, and hard. I’m booking a fine needle aspirational biopsy.” “Biopsy?” I thought, “But that’s how cancer starts. It always starts with a biopsy.” A few days later I had a phone appointment with a doctor. He asked if I’d suddenly lost weight, if I had night sweats, couldn’t swallow properly, was out of breath, had blood in my mouth, did I smoke, how much did I drink? These were unsubtle cancer questions, as obvious as a detective leaning towards you in a cell and asking if you have any evidence you were alone at home on the night of the murder. I asked whether he thought I had cancer. The doctor, who was Polish, said: “Not good. Chances not good.” I froze. “Do you mean the chances that it’s cancer are not good? Or that MY chances are not good?” I asked. “Chances,” he said, “Chance not good.” I’ve often complained about the habit of tennis commentators on the radio, who say things like “They’ve hit that shot into the net.” Who? Who has hit it into the net? This situation was similar. “Whose chances are not good? Mine or the cancer’s?” He paused. “Ah-ha, I mean, unlikely you have cancer.” I told my son, my daughter, my agent and various friends about the story, each time feeling a slight sense of failure. A comic depends on leaving an audience feeling jollier than before, and there seemed to be no way of telling this without causing worry and very little joy. I couldn’t make these gigs work at all. Maybe a cancer scare is more suited to thriller writers. I still half-believed I’d twisted my neck into a lump by sleeping on a badly designed pillow. But a biopsy makes everything seem grotesquely, cancerously real. Lying on another blue plastic bench, I was told the fine needle wouldn’t be enough as the lump was too big. I needed a “big needle” biopsy. My head was turned away, and I wondered how big this needle was. I assumed it was five feet long, the sort that Wile E Coyote would use for capturing the Road Runner. A few moments later I could feel the big needle sinking into my lumpy neck to extract the cells it needed. The doctor said, “Hmm. Suspicious.” By now I was used to the heightened tension in any room with a doctor that has any relation to cancer diagnosis. You become alert to the slightest facial change – the tiniest nose wrinkle sends you into a spiral of despair. “Look at the way the nurse is holding the pen. It’s a grip consumed with the melancholy air of catastrophic news. I’m done for.” “Very hard tumour”, the doctor said. It was hard to tell myself this comment didn’t suggest I had a very hard tumour. And now, a four-week wait for the results. Was this to drive the drama to the maximum? Was it orchestrated by Simon Cowell? Will a bass drum precede the revelation, like at the end of the Strictly Come Dancing results show? Do they stop for an ad break? The doctor told me I would be contacted before this appointment, with the results “in around seven days”. So the days after the biopsy were more terrifying than the biopsy itself. Every call from an unrecognised number stared at me with menace. The PC World employee will never know why I answered the phone with “yes hello hello yes oh my God let me just steady myself OK oh my God”. Several people had told me that if the results were ominous, I would hear quickly. So when five days passed, I felt confident. When it got to 12 days, I rang the hospital cheerily and was told the biopsy was still being checked. I was booked in for an MRI scan and a Cat scan. Then, just after I came off stage from presenting some awards in a hotel in Paddington, I noticed an email that said “We apologise for the inconvenience, but your biopsy was lost in transit. You need to arrange to come in for another one.” I strolled to the underground in a trance. How could this happen? Had the system for taking biopsies to the testing centre been outsourced to a food delivery company? Maybe they’d mixed my biopsy up with some chilli sauce and some poor sod had spread it on his burrito. Did I trust them to take another one? They might send off some milk from the fridge by mistake, and I’d be told I have an alarmingly high level of calcium. Then a completely new person called me, and said I had to go in for a repeat biopsy the next day “to see what stage of cancer you have”. “Hang on,” I said, “No one has said it’s definitely cancer, are you saying it’s definitely cancer?” She paused. “Yes. Had no one told you?” A friend who used to be a nurse had advised me it was essential to be a “polite pest”. You must be prepared to question what they’re telling you, but always do it politely. As well as being unwell, you become overwhelmed in a hospital. You wander through a mysterious system of tunnels, lifts, pink zones and blue zones, corridors in which trolleys swing from unexpected side-turnings carrying someone with an oxygen mask while cleaners, pharmacists and surgeons coalesce to create this extraordinary factory of living. And you’re just one patient, to whom this appointment means everything. Most of the staff are paid appallingly and treated with contempt. Their minister quit and went on I’m a Celebrity, so don’t take out your frustrations on them. Even so, it’s reasonable to ask politely how they could have lost the biopsy and forgotten to tell me I had fucking cancer. I was called in to see a consultant, and went with my son. As we arrived the doctor looked at his screen and said: “I’m afraid it’s not good news, Mr Steel.” Never do you realise how much you want to live until a doctor in a cancer follow-up says “I’m afraid it’s not good news, Mr Steel.” The biopsy had been found at a different hospital, so I had to go to there the next day to learn the results, which he couldn’t tell me, though he could tell me the lump was definitely a secondary cancer, which meant I had cancer in at least two places. “Is this deadly?” I asked. “Touch wood,” he said. And he touched some wood, which I suppose was professional. My head ran into a series of extreme areas. Two of my closest friends, Linda Smith and Jeremy Hardy, died of cancer. I was with each of them in their final days, and often wonder about the sheer randomness of how long we’re allotted. If I conked out now, would that be unlucky? I would still be luckier by several years than either of them, and it would be hard to argue my extra time was down to skill. I wondered if my son and daughter could carry on living in my house if I died, or if that would that involve me filling in a pile of complicated forms and trying to remember forgotten passwords. I wondered if it would be fair if my son had my car and my daughter my record collection. I pondered what the jokes would be. Would someone say there’s a new radio show called Mark Steel’s in Ground? I tried to have a normal day. I went to my weekly session in which I speak French with Fatima. Forlorn and gaunt, I explained how the hospital had lost my biopsy. “Ils ont perdu le biopsie”. Fatima tapped me on the arm in resignation. “La biopsie”, she corrected me. “La biopsie est feminine.” I’d been warned by people close to me that it was a mistake to see my diagnosis as having two possible, distinctly opposite results, in which cancer is doom and “not cancer” will be resolved with a packet of Strepsils. Most cancers now are seen as curable. Even the ones that aren’t curable are treatable, and patients live for many years. My generation were brought up thinking cancer was as final as being beheaded, but that’s no longer true. If it’s cancer, there will be a plan to deal with the cancer. The next morning, again with my son, we sat in a waiting room preparing for these details. I said, “I feel like a football team that’s nine games into the season and I’ve not had one win.” Every meeting, every scan, it always felt a bit worse. Nothing is as nervy as such an appointment. I sat on the chair and tried to convince myself that whatever the next moments revealed, it wasn’t too bad. “The first thing”, said the doctor, “is we have looked at the scans and there is no cancer in your lungs.” “There’s your first win of the season!” my son yelled. The doctor said that as a football fan, he understood. “Next, I have for you a good draw – we think the primary cancer is a lump in your throat, and that is very treatable.” Then there were some details about surgery and glands and chemotherapy and radiotherapy and taking six months off performing, but I didn’t hear any of that. This was the moment I learned I would probably live through this. He was sorry I would have to cancel some shows. I’d have been delighted if he’d said I’d be alright, but would have to spend my life placing the raisins into bars of Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut. I looked to the heavens I don’t believe in and sighed for two minutes. At the PET scan the following week, I was injected with radioactive dye and had to wait an hour before being placed under the machine. “Mr Steel, the scan you are having today is the Rolls-Royce of scans,” said the nurse. This was the moment when I was closest to weeping. This nurse was so proud of the equipment she was associated with, the ingenuity she was administering, the expertise she was included in. Thirty years ago, my situation may have been fatal, just as measles would have been 100 years ago. But now it probably won’t be. Because physicians and doctors and scientists have dedicated themselves to blasting away these cellular mutations. Because nurses and cleaners and caterers have run the hospitals, having arrived from all over the world. And because campaigners and writers and trade unionists created a National Health Service and defended it from those who try to undermine it. The results of the PET scan, the Rolls-Royce of scans, showed there was no cancer in me outside the neck and throat area, so there should be no reason why a combination of treatments wouldn’t cure it all. I’m writing this a few days from an operation that I hope will confirm the location of the cancer, from which a programme of treatment can begin. The current estimate is that I should be able to start performing again in about six months. So, that’s my current state of affairs. I have cancer, but it’s a cancer that can be got rid of. I feel like there’s a leopard in my house, locked in a room. I’ve contacted the leopard authorities and they assure me they are used to dealing with leopards like this, and they have a plan for removing the leopard. It will take a while, though, and once in a while I can hear it growl. And that’s all very reassuring. Even so, several times a day I think to myself: “Hang on, there’s a leopard in my house.” Mark Steel’s podcast What The F*** Is Going On? is available to listen to now. A longer version of this article is available here.