Cancer treatment begins and I may be a world record holder

Treatment started on Wednesday with a syringeful of chemotherapy solution. It was this colour - 

- which was nice, because it matched my cardi. 

Seriously, though, when someone puts something that colour in your veins, you know it's toxic. You just hope it's killing the right bits of you.

Afterwards, I headed downstairs with a bagful of chemotherapy tablets, to have my first radiotherapy session. And this is where my proud moment occurred.

The team will only give you pelvic radiotherapy if you have around 200ml of liquid in your bladder, so they make your drink about half a litre of water 45 minutes before you're due to get zapped. Before switching the rays on, they take a scan of the area, to check everything's as it ought to be. 

I lay on the bed/table, surrounded by space-age machinery. They scanned me. I waited.

Then I waited some more, passing the time by imagining that said machinery was going to put me in stasis so I could carry out a very important space mission.

Eventually, the nurse came through. 'Your bladder is ginormous,' she informed me. 'Do you think you could fill two cups of wee and come back?'

I told her I could. I have not had children, so - to steal a Victoria Wood quote - I have a pelvic floor like a bulldog clip. Stopping mid-flow? Pah! Piece of piss (almost literally).

When I returned, they showed me the scan. The screen was entirely filled by my bladder. However, when they plonked an ultrasound wand on me to check how much liquid was left in there, I still had around 800ml. One-and-a-half cups later and I was ready to go.

This means that, when I initially hopped on the bed, I had around 1.5 litres in there. I have a 2 litre bottle of Pepsi in the kitchen. The idea that I can hold 3/4 of that in my bladder makes me feel both proud and disturbed. HOW IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE? It occurs to me that what I thought were my breasts are in fact the rest of my organs, shoved into my chest by a land-grabbing bladder. Whatever - I feel I ought to contact whoever took over from the McWhirter twins at the Guinness Book of Records and ask to be included in the next edition.