I’ve just completed 20 sessions of radiotherapy for prostate cancer, one every weekday. I have a long-standing fear of hospitals dating from two weeks' incarceration at the age of five in 1952. Hospitals then were scary places for a small child, alone, but the one thing I remember clearly is a chest X-ray machine.
Seventy years on, lying on the table of a Varian Truebeam linear accelerator, looking at the blue sky, fluffy clouds and apple blossom projected on the ceiling, I found myself gazing in wonder at the technology that has delivered my treatment. I had seen the ravages wrought by radiotherapy on my mother in 1976 and I was about to describe my treatment as ‘a walk in the park.’