Oh God it's cancer - Splenic Marginal Zone and Waldenström’s

This blog is primarily about my husband’s blood cancers, specifically SMZL – Splenic Marginal Zone Lymphoma and WM - Waldenström’s Macroglobulinaemia. Both are indolent or low grade forms of Non Hodgkins Lymphoma. They are his cancers not mine but when you’re married so many things become a joint effort.

Most of what follows will be of particular significance to those who are dealing with indolent or low grade blood cancers but we have learned that some things are common to other cancers.

Like so many people writing cancer blogs our hope is that we can help someone either living with cancer or trying to support someone who has it.

There are some useful cancer information and research sites and doctors and nurses do a great job telling us what we need from that perspective. What we’ve found particularly helpful is blogs written by people with the same or a similar sort of cancer. Splenic Marginal Zone Lymphoma and Waldenström’s Macroglobulinaemia are relatively rare cancers so there aren’t very many blogs. Hence this attempt.

I’ve tried to strike a balance between honesty (or there’s no point) and trying to keep the tone light (or this thing will be unreadable). The blog is interspersed with my own investigations for bowel cancer in an effort to keep it real - sometimes life can be so crappy (forgive the awkward pun) that it’s almost funny – except it’s really not.