(music)

My name is Tania Wright and I'm 43 years old

and the type of cancer I was diagnosed with is anal cancer.

It did feel a bit like a poor relation in the cancers.

It feels a bit weird to say that you would have preferred -

I would have preferred, in some ways, to have breast cancer

because people know about breast cancer, you kind of know what the treatment is

I thought my friends are going to be looking on the internet and looking up my cancer

because they want to help and they'll want to understand and they've probably never heard of it

and they're going to look it up and think 'Maybe there's something she did she didn't tell us about'

- so yeah, it was a bit embarrassing.

I think I was not worried about the general public, but I was worried about what people close to me would think

I found some very basic information about anal cancer but it was all the same

and then I thought, well actually I would quite like to hear or understand

someone else's experiences that's gone through this

and I really struggled to find anything in England, and so I started this blog.

So my husband and I sat down one night and I said, 'Right, you've got to help me think of a name.'

So we came up with 'A Bum Deal' - well, I certainly wanted some humour

I was actually looking for funny things to talk about. So, one day, I go for radiotherapy -

the most depressing place in the world - and I get myself all lied down

as comfy as you can be on this bed with a mould in your bottom, a putty kind of mould,

so, you know, you can imagine I'm not that comfortable.

So I'm lying there and she goes off and what they would do is play nice music while you're being zapped, basically

and this one day they've got this DVD on and I came out and I said to the woman

'I can't believe you played that!' She says, 'What?'

I say 'I can't believe you played The Ring of Fire! What are you trying to do to me?'

She says, 'No! We didn't, did we?' And she said, 'It's only a western CD' and I said, 'Well, it's The Ring of Fire.'

That was kind of an example of the way I've used humour to get through it.

I'll get the results of the biopsy I've just had done soon.

Hopefully that will allow me to put it to bed for a little bit.

But I'm really good at the moment, I feel like I did before, getting on with life.

My blog website, if anybody would find it useful to look at it - I'm happy for anyone to look at it -

the URL is abumdeal.blogspot.com. You don't need the www.

[New speaker] For information, help, or if you just want a chat, call the Macmillan Support Line on 0808 808 00 00

or visit macmillan.org.uk