Vicky enters a desert of depression and is engulfed by a sense that her life has lost all purpose. Yet she has made a remarkable recovery. Her former career no longer appeals to her so she looks for something else to do. She wants to practise what she calls 'humane medicine' and decides finally to train as a GP. Everything is in place for her new life when illness makes her think again. Once more she faces a shifting horizon but with renewed hope because an exciting new idea is taking shape.

It was to be a full two years before Vicky felt truly fit and ready to try her hand at something new. This is not surprising in view of the debilitating effects of further chemotherapy and surgery, and for a while she suffered severe depression. She was appalled that after all her struggles to keep alive she could find no joy in the prospect. She found herself staring into space and being tempted by the thought that it would be so `nice and easy just to be dead'. Why was it so difficult, she asked herself, to make the transition from being ill to well?

She answered her own question: `it's really easy being ill - people don't expect anything of you - no pressures - a cop-out - you just make people happy by being easy, not complaining and being understanding. Once you are a bit better and start doing things e.g. work-writing and having less time, people can't understand why you no longer have all the time in the world to speak to them and concentrate on their worries!'

Immediately she reproached herself for having such ungrateful thoughts. After all, it was not just she, Vicky, who had struggled. Her nearest and dearest had fought the battle with her and had suffered for her. She could not let them down now: `it's just not enough to have been brave in illness, I should be brave in recovery and show people what I can do.' In typical Vicky fashion she immediately wrote down what she should be doing in her work and, to round it off, she counted her blessings. She was loved, she had money and two lovely homes. Above all, she was ALIVE. `Now show them the fight for life has been worthwhile and enjoy life while you can.'

All the same, no matter what her husband and friends said to reassure her, she found it hard to imagine she had a future waiting for her. She was tormented by self-doubt and uncertainty. She felt inadequate and the appetite for research had left her. She was no longer excited by the prospect of making new discoveries and pipping others to the winning post.

The depression lifted at last and she began to think of alternative careers in medicine: oncologist, endocrinologist, GP. It was this last option which attracted her the most.

'Patients . . . I am good with patients . . . I have got something special to give patients . . . I can be sympathetic . . . I get on with them, they get on with me . . . I feel you can psyche patients to be better . . . I can't have family now - I want to look after families.' This urgent sense of wanting to work in close contact with patients is a recurring theme in her deliberations. She rejected the idea of being a hospital consultant because she felt that this was not the best way of establishing a doctor-patient relationship. She was convinced that as a doctor who had experienced a life-threatening illness she had something special to share with patients; this she could make more accessible to them in a GP's surgery than in a hospital consulting room.

'Being a good GP is a skill I would love to acquire'. Vicky felt it would aid her to practice what she called 'humane medicine,' by which she meant caring for patients in a compassionate, sensitive way. She did wonder though whether she might not find such a close, committed patient-doctor relationship emotionally draining. Her medical friends warned her that she would miss the intellectual challenges she had enjoyed so much in her research work. Vicky, however, saw in general practice an opportunity to `free her mind'. Anyway, she would use the GP base to follow up other things that were catching her attention: hospice work, cancer support groups, the effects of a positive attitude, the benefits or otherwise of counselling and complementary therapies; above all she wanted evidence for her belief that patients did better when they were told the truth. She was thrilled by the new horizons opening up before her.

After consulting many people she finally made up her mind. She would become a GP. As soon as possible in the New Year she would seek out a practice where she could be taken on as a trainee. On 23rd December 1983, her thirty-fifth birthday, her diary entrance reads: 'Tearful on waking - still alive after one year!'

May 1984 and Vicky was all set to go. She had been accepted by a GP practice and informed Professor Besser at Barts that she was giving up research. She worked harder than ever before, even by her standards, to clear her desk and prepare for the new job. Then, suddenly, she was back in hospital, on a drip, feeling tired and awful. It wasn't thought to be a recurrence of the cancer but her doctors and her husband warned her that she was doing too much, pushing herself too hard.

There were several familiar faces on the ward: patients who belonged to the same support group as herself. Getting to know them better, listening to their stories, sharing their emotions, marvelling at their courage, all served to reinforce her conviction that patients often offer each other the best therapy:- comfort, support, above all, sympathetic understanding.

Ten days later and Vicky was home again and in the grip of a powerful new idea. She knew now where her future lay. She intended to set up a national association for informing and supporting cancer patients. How it would work, who would run it, what it would offer: all these important questions were yet to be answered but, feeling fit and energetic once more, Vicky had no qualms about her ability to resolve them, and in short order. From the day of diagnosis Vicky had vowed to ring every ounce of positivity she could from her cancer. She wanted to help not just herself but other people too. At first, she had seen it as an opportunity to put right the problems of her friends and family. Now she had moved on: she realised that it was cancer patients who really needed the help, all 200,000 of them who are diagnosed with the disease every year in Britain. She was determined to establish exactly what they needed and find a way of offering it effectively.