How it all began...

Firstly, I want to talk about Steve's diagnosis and the time leading up to it.

We'd been at the Isle Of Wight Festival in June this year - my first festival and one of the muddiest there has ever been. It was supposed to be a Thursday-Monday trip, but Steve took a slightly drunken fall on the Friday and sprained his ankle. He didn't have the strength in his ankle to walk through thick, knee-deep mud so by Sunday morning we'd decided to come home.

My instincts were telling me we needed to get home ASAP. I've never really paid attention to instincts before, but there was something about this one that made me feel very uneasy.

Sunday was fine - we got home, had nice hot showers and a hot dinner, watched a film and had a good night's sleep - until about 6.45am, when Steve got up the go to the toilet. I was half asleep when he came back into our room and told me that he'd just lost about a pint of blood on the toilet.

Straight away I sat up and told him we needed to go to hospital right away. I didn't know the symptoms of bowel cancer, and at this point hadn't considered that cancer could be the reason for this "episode", but I knew that something like this is your body's way of telling you something isn't right.

There was no way Steve was going into hospital without putting up a fight - "Forget I said anything", "I'll call the doctor if it happens again", "I'm not having anyone examining me". Within half an hour, we were at Bournemouth Hospital A&E being seen by a doctor.

Steve was examined by a few different people and had bloods and blood pressure checked. Everything looked fine, so we were both anxious when we were told he'd be staying in hospital overnight.

On Tuesday 26th July, following a flexi-sigmoidoscopy (long flexible tube with a camera on the end to look inside the bowel), Steve was allowed home. We were told "a number of polyps" had been found and would be sent off for biopsy and that we'd have the results in about 2 weeks. A week later, Steve got a call to say his results were in and he had an appointment on Friday 6th July to discuss them.

This is when he was diagnosed.

Steve had never even considered that he could have cancer - he said that not ONCE did the possibility cross his mind. He thought his diagnosis was "a number of polyps" and that this was the reason for his bleed.

Having dealt with my mother's cancer for 8 years and therefore recognising a lot of the medical terms used by doctors when they were referring to Steve, I had suspected from quite an early stage that this bleed was a sign of something a lot more sinister than we'd previously thought.

I hadn't been allowed the time off work to go with Steve for his results, so his parents went with him. Steve's dad had suffered from pancreatic cancer a few years previously and both parents also had their doubts about the diagnosis, although they never told him that.

Steve and I work for the same company, and he was due to come back into work around 4pm, after collecting his results. 4pm came and went... I was clock-watching and looking at the door, waiting for him to walk through it and tell me everything was fine, although deep down I knew that this was not going to happen. After what seemed like hours, I saw the Mike, the company director (and a very good friend of ours) come into the office and have a hushed conversation with one of the managers - I remember clearly thinking "They're going to tell me that I need to go home now, because Steve has cancer." I went light-headed and woozy, I saw my manager's face appear in front of me and I heard "Gina, Steve is at home, you need to go. Mike is going to take you."

I was silent for the 5 minute car journey home because I was trying to prepare myself for what I knew I was about to hear. I walked into the lounge and my heart broke. My 6ft 2 boyfriend looked at me with terrified Bambi eyes and said "I've got bowel cancer." He fell into my arms and all I could manage was "I know, but it's going to be okay."