Kicking a football has been one of the joys of my life

Two nights running I was incontinent of urine and woke up with warmly weighted pyjama bottoms. Former nurse Catriona didn’t bat an eye. When she first came to France she was a carer for three geriatric English expats, a lady and two gentlemen, and both gentlemen wore nappies in bed. Less than an hour after I’d confessed, she had run down to the chemist and returned with a ten pack of culottes/broekjes/cuecas/pants for medium urinary leakage.

Though elaborated with decorative frills around the elasticated leg holes, the pads were not of the same thickness and high quality that her two gentlemen wore. She was apologetic about it. But if my incontinence was due to all these new tablets I was on – including antibiotics and corticosteroids – the inconvenience would be only temporary. And in the meantime we could all have a good laugh.

Last week I met Dr Deville the oncologist to collect the latest scan results. They were a mixed bag: some tumours had disappeared, others had shrunk, new ones had taken the stage. A merry dance. My lung photograph showed a ramified network of lines resembling a road map, which the radiographer, after lengthy consideration apparently, had identified as nothing worse than an infection. Not a bad result, all things considered. We were cautiously pleased.

But that same night I found a new and sensitive mass lying just beneath the skin of my throat, which in my amateurish and pessimistic way I automatically identified as a new tumour missed by the scanner. The following night I wet the bed for the first time. Catriona thought that perhaps the new antibiotic had a diuretic effect. Though a short-term dose, Catriona said that in all her nursing experience she had never before encountered such a massive one. Also around this time I began to notice that the 12-hourly morphine dose was insufficient to control a hot, sharp pain in my right shoulder.