Okay. I’m somebody whos generally always had pretty good health. Never really had any health problems. And I think when I started my job, my jobs got quite a lot of stress, and I used to always find at the end of the year, you know, between maybe October and December, that’s when I would feel quite run down. And what happened in 2004 was the start of 2004 I noticed that I was getting lots of niggly colds and flus, things that I would never normally get.

Also I started getting throat infections and ear infections, again things that I’ve never ever had. And I just kind of put it down to the fact that I’d had a very stressful year before and my body was just adjusting. Maybe I was just a bit burned out. But it just, it never ceased and I mean I look back now and I think, ‘Why did I not go to the doctor? Why did I not phone the doctor?’ But I didn’t. I just kind of put it down to, ‘Oh my immune system is a bit knocked because I’m burned out, I’ll take vitamins.

I guess this story starts on the 8th of September 2004. That was the day when, under pressure from my wife, I called my GP in London about a little problem that did not seem like a medical emergency. And this arose from a few, a couple of weeks earlier I’d been out of town on holiday, among other things tending the couple of roses that we have in a little garden in Dorset, and they’d scratched my hands a bit. And when I got back to London I noticed that the scratches weren’t really healing, so I thought, This will go away in a day or two, and after a week it hadn’t. So my wife said, You really should go and see the doctor. And in traditional male format I said, No. And then I one morning I thought, Well, yes, I’ll call the doctor.

So I called the surgery expecting to be offered an appointment the week after next and was completely astonished to be offered an appointment at 5.10 that afternoon. This was under the new NHS regime under which he kept one day a week free for walk-in appointments and I happened to have called on that one day. So I went off to see the GP whos about two hundred yards from my home. He poked around a little and said, Well, I can’t see anything obviously wrong with you but it’s just worth having a blood test. This may well prove to be some kind of viral infection that we can’t do anything about and it’ll probably clear itself up but if you go downrsquo;, not to the major London teaching hospital, which was about ten minutes walk away, but to a satellite of it about fifteen minutes away, and you get there at the start of the day you’ll be in and out in forty minutes or so.

1989 I began to get pains in my body. I wasn’t quite sure what it was. I put up with it for a bit. I went to my local doctors. He thought that it was because I’d returned from the tropics and I was facing the cold winter and this is the cause of my aches and pains. He also thought it could be a form of rheumatism and treated me accordingly. But then a year later, I developed a pain in my groin.

Right at the very beginning of your CLL was your only symptom a lump in your groin, was it?

No, my first symptoms were pains in my neck, pains in my arms, pains in my legs, so much so that they thought I’d got
Oh, rheumatism.

A rheumatism, a form of rheumatism. It was only a year after that the pain in the groin started, the right hand side of my groin, very low down in my groin, and it was then I think my local doctor at the time, I think alarm bells were ringing. And I think he knew what I’d got even before I did.

What was that pain like?

It was just as if you’ve been running very hard and you’ve got the stitch. But that’s the kind of pain it was. But it didn’t go away. It just nagged and nagged and not a sharp pain, just a nagging pain and I just knew that that there was something else wrong.

It started when I was having all sorts of different symptoms’ aching limbs, very tired, night sweats, day sweats, headaches, which had followed on from a period of having a bout of depression, and I thought it was still physical symptoms manifesting themselves from the psychological side. But as it went on it didn’t seem quite right, but the doctors couldn’t find anything in particular that was wrong. In December 1995 I actually asked if I could have a blood test, which they did, and they did a full blood count and nothing was found to be wrong. By August 1996 I was still getting very tired. I had been to the doctors and said about the sweating and was actually flippantly told that it was summer time and that’s to be expected. But the extent of it obviously meant more than that.

I was off work for 2 weeks in August 1996, and having injured my shoulder I went along to the doctors to see about it, where he gave me an examination and decided to do a full blood count, I believe because he thought it was something to do with my heart. And I had been unable to carry out any decorating that I wanted to do that week, and also my father had been in hospital having back surgery, and the cafeteria was on the top level of the hospital in [city] and I found I couldn’t get up the stairs without being totally out of breath and soakingwith sweat.

Yes, I was diagnosed with CLL in March 2000 or April I think it was, 002. And it was a shock because I’d felt perfectly well, as is often the case I understand, and I’d been to my doctor. I suffered occasionally from slightly high, slightly raised cholesterol and had been advised to have fairly regular cholesterol checks. Went along to the GP and asked for a cholesterol test and she said, Well, why don’t you have a full blood test And I said, Well, nothing to lose And I did that and then, of course, you know, the next day I get a phone call from the hospital and from my GP saying to go along. And at first my counts weren’t that high and they thought it could be possibly I was fighting an illness. But they ran later tests and then confirmed that I had in fact got CLL.

On October 2006 I decided to donate blood. And at that time I was in very good health, I was running, I was having a very healthy diet and at that time I had intentions to run a London marathon in 2008, so that’s what I was preparing for. And I got an appointment for fifteenth of October, which was not convenient for me because it was a fasting month and as a Muslim we can’t donate blood when we are fasting. And so what I did I cancelled that appointment to 31st October. And when I went to donate blood they drew a little sample of the blood before they took it, and they put it in a kind of liquid and it’s supposed to float. And it did not float and they said the haemoglobin level was too low. And I was very embarrassed at that time because I had a very good diet, I was in a very good shape as well. And they said they had to take a sample and send it away for further investigation.

The next day I received a call from the blood transfusion centre and a doctor said to me that I had to go and see my GP because they found something weird in my blood. And I booked an appointment with my GP. The next day I went to see him and the doctor from the transfusion centre said that he was going to fax the report straight away. But my GP lost the report and he advised me to go and have another check up, another blood test. So I went on the following day for another blood test and on the 9th November at 7.30, I remember exactly, I was watching Channel 4 News, my doctor rang me and he said to me, ‘Whatever you are doing go to that London hospital. So I asked him, I said, Is anything wrong? He said, No, nothing is wrong, just go and see a haematologist who worked there. They are expecting you.

So I put some extra clothes on because it was quite cold. And I went to see the doctor. And I went to emergency and they asked me what is wrong and I said, I don’t know. And because it was a very busy A and E they didn’t like it. But to be very honest I didn’t know what was wrong. So a doctor came to see me and he asked me what I was there for. I said, Well I don’t know. My GP asked me to come and see you. And he said, Well, we don’t have any record of you here. I said, Well, he asked me to come and see the haematologist. Anyway, he called the haematology department and there was a junior doctor, on-call doctor or whatever they are, and she said, Yes, we were expecting him just ask him to.. And I think she had mentioned it to the doctor that we think that he has got leukaemia. And the doctor came back and the smile he had before was gone. And he said to me, Just have a seat and the doctor will be with you shortly.

Anyway, the doctor came and she said to me that they have a suspicion that my blood is not up to a level and I might have a leukaemia.

And I never had any symptoms whatsoever about my leukaemia. That is very unusual because the first thing you have you have out of breath if your haemoglobin is low. That’s what I learnt later. But I was running at that time. You know, I never had that symptom. I never had any symptoms in fact.