Dave Hodgson is under no illusion about what is happening to him as he fights cancer. He tells Richard McComb about fulfilling dreams and coping day by day.

We have been playing email ping pong between Birmingham and Dubai, setting out the parameters for the interview.

Dave Hodgson says nothing is off limits but he would still like to know what the angle is. If I was in his position, I would want to know, too.

Dave, a marketing and branding expert, has made a career out of finding the right angle. The angle is everything. So what’s the Dave Hodgson angle?

What he says next is typical of the man: pithy, succinct – blunt, even. He wants to know if I am after the “Dave is dying angle.”

I tell him the “Dave is dying angle” is exactly what I had in mind. But he already knew that. It’s the only angle in town.

Dave, who is 41, has metastatic melanoma, a relatively rare and aggressive form of skin cancer. Melanoma comprises 10 per cent of skin cancer cases and kills 2,000 people each year in England and Wales. Metastatic means the cancer has spread, in Dave’s case to four different parts of his body.

His fortitude and good humour in the unforgiving grip of the disease has been described as inspirational. All too often, the term is used in a glib, lazy fashion. It comforts us when we speak of people with terminal illnesses; it gets us out of awkward conversations about death and what it is like to stare it in the face, with the loss of everything that death entails.

And yet I am struggling to come up with a better way (succinct, blunt or otherwise) to convey an essence of the man. Dave has told me about the tumours the surgeons have cut from his body, the one in his armpit that was the size of an orange, the four tumours they found in his small intestine. The latest is on his liver.

He has spoken of the “price of life,” which a US medic told him had been established at $78,000, about £50,000. The doctor said: “If the medical treatment is less than $78,000, you are economically viable to have it.” Dave’s own treatment, involving a revolutionary drug therapy, happens to cost $120,000 (£77,000).

The treatment has been buying him life, not securing it. He does not shy away from this, as he does not shy away from anything. Dave tells of suffering episodes of blind terror but these have been far outnumbered by the daily gestures of unconditional love from family and friends, and the compassion of strangers. What remains is laughter and warmth – and a devotion to Wigan Athletic, fighting relegation at the foot of the Premier League. Inspirational, you see.

Dave, the former marketing director at Marketing Birmingham, lives in Dubai with his wife, Natalie, and her daughter, Olivia, with whom he is smitten. He moved to the United Arab Emirates to take up a dream job and fell in love with the place and its people. He never wants to “come home.” Dubai is home although for how much longer he does not know. No one does. Shortly after we speak, he is admitted to hospital for emergency surgery on the bile ducts of his liver, which have become blocked.

“I keep having the ‘why me?’ and I keep having the ‘I’ll probably never retire.’ I’ve got a pension. I don’t know what to do with that now,” says Dave.

“You plan for your future but you don’t know what your future is. I made sure Olivia had the most spectacular seven-year-old’s birthday party you have ever seen, which included having a London double-decker bus parked at the front of the house in Dubai. I don’t know if I’ll see her eighth.

“For Natalie’s 30th, we had dinner in the highest restaurant in the world. I don’t know if I’ll see her 31st.

“At Christmas, we’ve got my mum over for a month and we are going to have Christmas in Dubai, roast turkey, might go to the pool. And it’s going to be a sensational Christmas. I don’t know if I am going to see the next one.

“But I am very thankful that I am seeing this one and I am happy I am seeing this one. I am not sad that I might not see another because you just don’t know. If I find out that I can’t, well, what will I see?

“I am pretty level-headed with it all. I’m not in denial. I know that the chances are, realistically, that I’ll probably die next year. Probably. If the medicines all go well, which is a difficult shot, then I might be alive next year. But in reality, I will probably be dead. I’m not angry about that and I’m not in denial.”

I got to know Dave from his work on the Taste of Birmingham food festival with Marketing Birmingham. I last saw him in 2009, at a Champagne do at a cool Birmingham hotel. He enjoyed the social side of life out but insists reports of his party-going were greatly exaggerated.

The day before we speak, Dave had returned to work at Dubai’s hyper-luxury Meydan development, famous for holding the Dubai World Cup, the world’s richest horse race. He joined Meydan as director of corporate communications in July 2010, having previously worked in consultancy in Dubai.

When I last saw Dave, he weighed 17-and-a-half stone. He now weighs 13 stone. He is chuffed to be back at work and his spirit is undiminished but his voice, as he takes me through his story, has a whispered softness to it.

It was in January 2010, a few days before he was due to move to Dubai, that Dave’s life took a dramatic turn. He had previously seen his GP about a wart on the side of his body. He had caught it in bed and it started bleeding. The doctor removed it, sent it for “routine tests” and said that as it wasn’t a mole there was nothing to worry about.

Dave’s phone went as he was walking through Stratford-upon-Avon. It was his doctor.

“He said, ‘You know this routine test? There’s a problem.’

“I said, ‘Oh, what’s the problem?

“He said, ‘I’m afraid you’ve melanoma cancer.’

“I said, ‘I have no idea what that is.’

“He said, ‘It’s skin cancer.’

“I said, ‘That’s unfortunate. I’m about to go to Dubai.’”

Dave asked how bad it was and the GP explained doctors measured the size of the growth to establish severity. If it was more than 2mm thick, “you are in big trouble.” Dave’s was 1.8mm.

“I said, ‘I’m OK then?’

“He said, ‘You should be. You need to come in and we need to do an operation.’”

The melanoma was removed at Warwick Hospital on January 20 and Dave recuperated for three weeks before flying to Dubai. Subsequent tests were clear.

Following the operation, Dave had been taught how to self-examine to detect early signs of problems.

He says: “I am standing in the shower, washing under my arm, and I noticed my glands are up. I’d had a bit of a cold. I thought I’d keep an eye on that. I remember the doctor saying ‘Your glands shouldn’t swell. If they do swell, you need to come and see us.’”

Dave’s glands were still enlarged when he returned to UK for a routine check at Warwick in November. “By this time, they felt they were the size of a golf ball,” recalls Dave.

The doctor told him the melanoma was probably back. It was metastatic: “What that means is that the cells start travelling around in your blood stream and latch on to things like lymph glands and your other organs. The doctor said, ‘As long as it’s not in a major organ, we can deal with this because the only cure for melanoma is surgery. The only way to get rid of it is cut it out.’”

Dave had surgery at Christmas. Medics found 14 lymph glands in the left armpit, nine of which had melanoma, one the size of an orange. He returned to Dubai and was told he would need radiotherapy to kill any “stray cells.” For three days a week, for a month, Dave drove to Abu Dhabi for treatment and carried on working.

He and Natalie returned to the UK in April 2011 for a marriage blessing at Aston Cantlow in Warwickshire and later have a honeymoon in the Maldives. “It was the dream wedding. It was everything we wanted it to be. It was a beautiful, romantic emotional time. It was the perfect day,” says Dave.

The couple returned to Dubai but Dave did not feel well. Now under the care of an oncologist in Dubai, a scan was ordered. “I thought, ‘Here we go. Every time I do a CT scan, it’s always bad news, they always find something. Lo and behold, my small intestine has four large melanoma tumours. The cancer’s back. This is its third time.”

Surgeon Dr Nader Salti removed the tumours at the American Hospital, Dubai, in May. Having got to know Dave, and his sense of humour, he took a picture of the intestine and sent it to the patient’s Blackberry. “It always amuses me – and is always good at dinner parties,” says Dave.

Two months later, in July, Dave was re-admitted to hospital suffering wild temperature fluctuations, uncontrollable shivering and pain in his right side. He was sitting in his hospital room with Natalie when oncologist Dr Maroun El Khoury walked in. Dave remembers the date and the time – 5.45pm, July 12.