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The last thing I remembered before going under was my doctor staring intently at a TV monitor.

After waking, and during a lull on the ward, I saw my notes, in a red-bound folder near my bedside. An inbuilt nosiness proved too strong and the pages fell open at two small Polaroid photographs. Underneath them it said I had a circumferential carcinogenic tumour 20 centimetres into the sigmoid colon. That's a tumour that's squeezing my lower bowel but the word carcinogenic - cancerous - was the heaviest blow of all.

Strangely, I felt calm. In all of us there's probably a little bit of pessimist or hypochondriac anyway and I had certainly felt that all was not too well. As I hid away in a small side room, there was really only one way to think. Of course the biopsy results would have to be confirmed but the doctor who found the tumour was experienced enough to recognise a tumour when he saw one, so it was cancer.

Benign or nasty, who could say? Already it appeared that I was about to enter a game of chance with a higher being - and he was holding five aces. Within the next 72 hours things went from bad to worse. A liver scan and CT scan - a sort of revolving X-ray which builds up a 3-D image of your insides - happened in the same day. And when on the Thursday my surgeon asked me to summon my wife from Bristol to Bath within 30 minutes, it wasn't going to be for a party.

Breaking the news to someone who has apparently not got much of a future can't be easy, even for the most experienced doctors. I'd already decided that whatever happened from now on, I would be rational, calm and ask the questions I needed to. After all, from here on in, we knew the cancer was there, it was a question of how we managed it.

The basic problem, he said, was that there were lesions throughout both parts of the liver.

For a real chance of survival, there had to be a hope of saving part of the organ, which is the only one in the body that can regenerate. But there was not enough good liver left in me and an operation was out of the question. Neither was a transplant a solution for someone with cancer cells inside them. So while George Best, who's boozed most of his away, can walk around with a bleeper to alert him the moment a suitable donor comes up, for me it simply wasn't an option.

The only hope was that chemotherapy would help and he would ask an oncologist to meet me.

That would happen the next day, and while once again I would take a big blow, there was enough spark to relight a fire.

For some minutes, left alone, Nicola, my wife, and I hugged. What I needed now was to be calm and rational and I needed her to be strong too.

Millions of things race through your head at times like this, believe me.

After nearly 10 years together, despite arguments, despite differing views, we're still strongly and deeply in love. Some people say I don't have much small talk. The phrase would be "He needs to get out more," but since we have been together, apart from the occasional business course or jaunt, I haven't wanted to spend my time with anyone else, so if that's a criticism, then fine, I'll accept it.

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