Tim Richardson’s recently-published book, There Should Be Blood, is a humorous and engaging tale of a blood cancer diagnosis that should give hope to other people dealing with ‘the big C’.
Tim reveals in this moving and very personal account how he was diagnosed with an unpronounceable disease during the height of Covid.
Tim Richardson. Picture: Keith Heppell
“2020 is when it happened, which of course was right in the middle of the pandemic,” remembers the affable author, speaking to the Cambridge Independent from his home in Godmanchester.
“And, as you’ll see in the book, I simply had a lump in my neck and snuck into a doctor’s surgery and then had a blood test.
“They said, ‘You’ve got to go in for a blood transfusion immediately’.
“They weren’t sure what was going on; basically, my haemoglobin, which is the red blood cells, was down at 70-something – and they said it should be about 140.
“And they said it could be a number of things – it could be anaemia, it could be a lack of minerals, iron…”
Tim went to the hospital for further tests, scans and biopsies.
“Most people would think, ‘Oh, that’s a bit scary’ – mine were just very odd,” he says, “and what I put in the book is a lot more humour about it, because that’s the way I deal with things.
“But it took about a month or so and then they said, ‘Well, I think you’ve got this extraordinary disease called Waldenström macroglobulinemia’.
“Basically it’s a slow-growing form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. It’s a blood cancer, I’d had it for a long time, I guess…
“I said to the consultant, ‘How do you get it?’ and he said, ‘It’s just pure bad luck. A couple of your blood cells lost the plot and instead of dying off – which your blood cells do, and replenish – they went, ‘No, we’re clinging on’.’
“So they just multiplied badly, shall we say.”
Tim describes a cancer diagnosis as “the big thing you never want to hear” and explains that following the blood transfusions, the doctors wanted to give him chemotherapy straight away.
“But in the middle of a pandemic, when your immune system and mine was really low – by the way it still is – they said, ‘This is not a good thing’,” he recalls.
“‘We don’t really want to keep bringing you in to the hospital every two weeks because there’s a lot of bad things going on in the hospital around Covid’.
“And at the time I was lucky; I had been paying into a private insurance for a while and asked if it would make any difference and the consultant said, ‘Well it would actually, you can benefit from advances in technology and medicine which is around a targeted therapy’.
“So I was put on that tablet straight away and the result was pretty quick – my haemoglobin went back up, inch-by-inch, over the next few months to a good response.”
Following three or four blood transfusions in the early days following his diagnosis, and then the aforementioned tablet, Tim says he has since been given immunoglobulin infusions.
“Because my immune system is pretty rubbish, I occasionally have these infusions that help my immune system, in theory,” he explains.
“It’s not terribly successful, it has to be said, but there we go.”
How is Tim doing now?
“I’m doing well actually,” he replies. “The treatment has been tremendously successful. Apparently, Waldenström macroglobulinemia is a disease that you die with, not necessarily of…
“So it’s a bit like diabetes, or some sort of high blood pressure thing. If it’s not treated, your bone marrow gets infected and then you end up having to have bone marrow transplants and things like that.
“So I guess I was fortunate, to a point. My bone marrow was 90 per cent infected, so it’s now hopefully a whole lot less so!
“You say, ‘Is that in remission?’ and they say, ‘Well, in your case it’s a controlled state’. I’ve asked if it goes away and they say, ‘We don’t know – it might, but it might not’.”
Tim adds: “You don’t live in fear, you just kind of get on with life… I feel fine, and the story is more about a tale of dealing with something that just knocks you for six, in the midst of all the other things that are going on.
“And just living with it and being hopeful amongst some of the human reactions – because there were times when I was very fearful.”
Tim, who is also a poet, an executive coach and a leadership consultant, has already held a launch for the book at Waterstones in St Neots.
There will be another event in London in October, at The Old Operating Theatre in Southwark.
“My friend, who’s the manager of the Waterstones in St Neots, was reading it and she said, ‘This has made me laugh so much. It’s great, and yet powerful’,” he notes.
“People say it’s light and yet it’s profound.”
There Should Be Blood is available now. For more on Tim, visit timrichardson.me.