Of the side effects I have experienced during my chemotherapy for testicular cancer, many of them are well-known: the hair loss, the nausea, and the fatigue. These are perhaps the most significant, and they have affected me more than I expected them to, but there are also other little reminders of the treatment that I’m going through which, every now and then, jump up and catch me by surprise.

To start with the obvious ones then: nausea. This caught me from day one. The drive back from Oxford was one of the longest journeys of my life, and I have rarely felt as ill as I did then. The worst of it passed reasonably quickly, and it settled into a low-level feeling of sickness, largely manageable through anti-sickness drugs and a bland, solid diet of porridge, bread and crumpets. A change of medication for my second cycle also helped to some extent.

The fatigue has had a much longer impact. Especially in the early part of the treatment cycle, there are days where I can barely get out of bed, then when night arrives, I can’t sleep. Because chemotherapy attacks all quickly-regenerating cells, including red blood cells, I am regularly short of breath, struggling at times to breath even while lying down. Something as simple as hanging the washing out can have me gasping for breath, which, on reflection, may just seem like a convenient excuse.

Losing my hair was more shocking than I expected it to be, given that I wasn’t the owner of a particularly luxurious head of hair to begin with. Seeing it on my pillow of a morning, and feeling it come out as I towelled my head dry after a shower were difficult to deal with; I addressed the problem head on, and shaved it all off before it went too far.

Alongside these, my weakened immune system meant I was vulnerable to a range of other illnesses. The week after I started my course of treatment read like an awful adaptation of a Craig David song: heavy cold on Monday, diarrhoea on Tuesday, migraine on Wednesday.

By Thursday, I had been admitted to hospital with a high temperature. Nothing particularly exciting came of it, I was just monitored for 24 hours, but it was more hospital time that it would have been nice to be without.

A persistent cough has caused concern with my doctors, as one of the drugs in my chemotherapy can cause lung problems. As with all these things, the level of monitoring and care has been excellent, and repeated lung X-rays have allayed fears.

Then there are the little, every day, niggles. Regular migraines have caused me to spend a lot of my time in a darkened room. My eyesight was affected for the first few days of each cycle, meaning I couldn’t even focus on the television, a pretty devastating development when you’re housebound.

Even the ends of my thumbs are a problem, as they have dried out and the skin worn through. Not only does this make it painful to open a can or bottle, but it also means that my phone will no longer recognise my thumb print and unlock itself – admittedly something of a first-world problem.

I guess they are all first-world problems: while unpleasant, they are a result of me getting the best treatment I can for this cancer, treatment which may feel unwelcome now, but which should allow me live healthily for years to come.