This is Spectator Radio and you're listening to Holy Smoke with Damian Thompson.

Welcome to Holy Smoke, the Spectator's Religion podcast.

I'm Damian Thompson. My guest today is a woman who's drawing on her Christian faith in order to face the challenge of a cancer diagnosis.

In fact, we're sitting in a flat next to Guy's Hospital where she's

just had a chemotherapy session. She's called Carmel Thompson, and yes, she is a relation.

She's my only sister. Carmel, this is a difficult subject for both of us to be discussing,

but especially for you, and yet there is something you'd like to say.

And that's why I'm delighted that you've agreed to appear on your brother's podcast.

Well, it is a privilege to be able to speak about this experience and actually to speak about it in a very positive way because I think I've astonished

myself as well as other people about how I've reacted to it. I think I always thought I was somebody

who wasn't going to get cancer. It might have been the heart disease from our family or something else,

but it just wasn't in my universe at all.

And coming in a year that was very fraught with difficulties

from a very traumatic relationship breakup

and the decline and then the loss of our dear mother in the summer,

you would have thought that was my lot for the year, really. And lo and behold, about a week

after the funeral, I began to get some symptoms, which turned out eventually to be a cancer diagnosis. So really,

they do come in threes, these things, as legend says. I was convinced that the symptoms were

of a gallbladder nature. I absolutely hadn't turned on to the idea of cancer. I thought my symptoms

added up to gallstones or some inflammation in that area. And then it was a rather slowish

investigation with my GP and taking myself off to a private London GP and then to fund my own scan because that's what I thought was going on.

And then some more test to do with possibly IBS. So Damien, you and I were both looking up

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