SO MUCH has happened in the past month, not least the proposals for a complete restructuring of the NHS.

I had an operation for removal of yet another tumour at the John Radcliffe Hospital. My surgeon, and his team were brilliant, and I was back in a day.

A few days later I had another scare. Fearing the worst, my wife drove me to A&E late one evening.

We were prepared for a long wait, as it looked very busy.

The staff obviously had their hands full, but nevertheless they prioritised me as urgent in view of my symptoms, and after a wait of only five minutes or so, I was whisked off to a side cubicle. I was quickly seen by the duty doctor, given a CT scan, and admitted to hospital for observation and further diagnostic testing.

I am delighted to say that after a five-day hospital stay I was able to return home having been told, to our great relief, that it was not cancer.

I have to admit I am a terrible patient, and don’t always comply with my wife’s requests to take it easy and stay off the computer.

I am reluctant to take a back seat with our cancer drugs campaign especially as the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) has just rejected Everolimus, the only life-extending drug available for patients who cannot tolerate Sutent, or for use when it has stopped working.

Everolimus works, but Nice says that it is too expensive using their unfathomable formulae that inflates actual true cost by 300 per cent!

These unfair decisions have certainly ensured that rarer cancer patients in this country are kept at the lower end of the cancer survival tables.

This is not difficult to appreciate when we read that since 2005, non-medics outnumber medics by two to one on Nice panels, and yet they are making life and death decisions.

Nice costs taxpayers £70m per year, and when they rejected all four of our kidney cancer drugs in 2008, the senior people enjoyed pay rises ranging from 11.7 per cent to 57 per cent, with chief executive Sir Andrew Dillon now on a minimum of £190,000 per year.

Perhaps one of the most shocking revelations I have come across is that the massive surplus of £1.7bn accumulated over at least four years, and representing taxpayers’ investment in the NHS, is now to be spent on NHS restructuring and massive redundancy payments for managers.

I do hope that has not been part of a managers’ bonus scheme target, whilst hundreds of cancer patients have been denied life-extending drugs due to cost.