Dr Claire McLintock and her F*** Cancer collab with Workshop

Claire McLintock. Photo / Greg Bowker

Claire McLintock shares the view from her window.

This is the window seat, which is my favourite seat in the house. I've got a 300-degree view of what's going on. When I get home from chemo, I'll always come and sit on the window seat and have a cup of tea and a melting moment. And the doggie comes and I just sit here and I listen to a podcast or watch something on the iPad or whatever.

I haven't been very well this year. I'm better now, but I was pretty sick at the beginning of the year, for a few months. I really didn't go out much, so I would sit here from really early in the morning. I'd be awake about 5 or 6. And so I would come out here in the morning and the house was quiet and the sun was coming up slowly. And I'd have a cup of tea, sit under a blanket and then just have a quiet start to the day, with no one else bothering me.

It's a sad diagnosis, it's a terrible diagnosis, but it doesn't mean to say you need to live a sad and terrible life. In fact, what you need to do is make the most of the opportunities that you're given. Decide if you want to do them, and then do them well. Live life as well as you can. And you don't have to be positive all the time. You can be positive all the time, but just take the time to examine if you're feeling sad, and acknowledge it, and you will come out of it.

I think it's made my relationships with my family so much better. We still fight and stuff like that. I had a really great argument with my daughter just last week. But we make up and we talk about it. We talk about why I might get angry. So it's much better. I mean, I think they would say that, too, but it also makes me cherish everything that I have.

I find it a bit hard sometimes, because I'm always trying to think, "What do they need to know? What do I need to tell them? What do they need to know about relationships? What about this situation? I need to tell them that if this happens, they must do that."

In July this year, we were going to have a holiday with our friends in Greece and then I was going to go meet my brother in Glasgow and we were going to scatter my mum's ashes - she died last September and I didn't get to see her. And then we were on our second day in Greece and I found out by trying to phone my brother that he'd died in his bath at home, alone, at age 59, five days before I was supposed to see him.

I told my doctor, "I'm never going to ask you how much longer you think I've got to live, because you don't know the answer to that question, and I don't know the answer, and actually, nobody knows the answer." But, like all patients, I desperately want to know.

When you get started on whatever drug, you look, and some people will physically ring the date on the calendar. And if they don't do it on the calendar, they've done it in their head. So even I did that with some of the drugs I was on. I would say, "Okay, so the median survival of these patients who got this drug was 24.2 months compared to 17.8 ..."

It's been a bit harder this year to not ask, which is why I told her I wasn't going to ask her, because now she can say. "To be clear, you didn't want me to answer that question."

Just because you don't talk about something doesn't mean it doesn't cast its shadow. We all know people who are affected by cancer and finding the right thing to say is very difficult. I see this as being a way to open up the discussion about what you can say and what you could maybe avoid saying. Like, don't say to your friend who's got terminal cancer: "Oh, look, we could all die tomorrow! We could be run over by a bus!" Having a terminal cancer doesn't stop you from being run over by a bus.

I've got this wonderful New Yorker cartoon that I bought years ago, and it's a doctor with a patient. The doctor says to the patient, "Sometimes it pays to look at it from another angle: Why not you?"
As told to Greg Bruce

Claire McLintock is a doctor and former president of the International Society on Thrombosis and Haemostasis, who has collaborated with her artist husband John Reynolds and friends Chris and Helen Cherry from Workshop to produce a limited edition range of T-shirts featuring the slogans "F*** Cancer" and "Don't Delay Fun" for Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Proceeds will go directly to support Sweet Louise, an NZ non-profit foundation for people with advanced breast cancer. T-shirts are for sale through website: https://fuckcancerdontdelayfun.nz/