A FUNNY thing happened at the hospital. We'd been talking for about an hour or so, three of us around a four-seater table. It being a table in the canteen of the Mater Private in Dublin and it also being lunchtime, the fourth seat hadn't gone unfilled.

It was all a little cramped but everyone was getting along and getting by, in that stoic way that people in hospitals generally do.

And so we talked away, about life and death and horses and football and all manner of things until it was time to go. As we got up to leave, the lady sitting in the fourth seat stood up as well and spoke for the first time. "Sorry, but I heard you talking about the horses and Monaghan there. I'm from Tydavnet myself and my husband had a big win the other day when he bet on a horse trained by some boy from Monaghan. Brady, I think his name was."

And Oliver Brady could do nothing else but laugh out loud and introduce himself. The faux pas delighted him. Some boy from Monaghan. He'll take that.

When Baron De Feypo came home three lengths ahead of Willie Mullins' well-fancied Snowy Morning at Naas last Sunday, it brought about Brady's first trip to a winner's enclosure for just a shade under six months.

If plenty who gathered to see him come in will have had a fair idea as to the reason for the barren spell, others would have been there just for the show.

For you haven't seen a winner's enclosure until you've seen an Oliver Brady winner's enclosure. He likes to tell the story of the day he was on his way to greet a winner of his at Naas a few years ago when an over-enthusiastic punter ran slap into him, nearly knocking him to the ground. The man apologised and explained that he was in a hurry because he didn't "want to miss the madman in the winner's enclosure".

But although he had a big smile and a tenfingered handshake for those waiting on him last Sunday, he had to leave the madman back home in Monaghan. When you've spent five days out of each of the past seven weeks travelling to Dublin for radiation treatment on the cancer in your stomach, people can well understand it if you bring something less than your customary Catherine wheel of excitement out with you. Still, it was all Brady could do to contain himself. As well as his first win since last July, he took two separate bookies for Euro12,500 apiece as the Baron came home the 20-1 winner. And the doctors tell him to try not to get over-excited.

It's around four years now since the day he sat in his car outside the Mater and tried to feel his way around the idea of having six months to live. A few weeks earlier, he'd been to Newmarket to see what new recruits he could scare up for his yard and had come home feeling a horrid cold in his bones and finding blood in his urine. Doctors found that a cyst had burst inside his stomach and told him that the cancer that was there would probably take him by the summer. Four years on, he's more fed up with the whole rigmarole than anything else.

"Three months ago, I went for a blood test and they found that the blood had just gone crazy and that there was a danger of it spreading out from my stomach.

If that happens, I'll be gone and that's that. But please God now this radiation will do the trick and I'll be around for another while yet. There's no sign of it spreading yet anyway.

"The treatment only takes around 20 minutes. The way it works is that there are tattoos on my stomach now, proper tattoos and the machine they use on me uses those tattoos as a guide. I can't put on weight or lose weight throughout the length of the treatment because if the size of my stomach changes then the tattoos are guiding the machine to a different place than would do the best job.

So when I come here, they weigh me and measure me and make sure I'm right before turning on the machine.

"I just lie there and the machine is turned on and it sends the radiation in after the cancer. There's not a bit of pain or anything. I'm just lying there and this machine is working away and I don't feel a thing. There's actually very few side effects at all. The only thing is that I sweat buckets for a few hours after it. And I have to drink a lot of water because the radiation is hitting my bladder. But other than that, the whole thing isn't too bad."

The whole thing isn't too bad? . As if it was an ingrown toenail or something. What you realise after talking to Brady for a while, though, is that he eventually did manage to work out what to do with the whole six-months-to-live thing. Simple, really. Ignore the first two words, concentrate on the last two.

"I've tried not to let it slow me down at all.

I have the business and I have the horses and, if anything, I'm putting more effort into them now than I ever did. I thought when they first diagnosed me that it was going to cause big problems but it hasn't. I think it's an attitude thing mostly. I could go home and sit in the house with my slippers and dressing gown on and cry about it but that's not me. I'd rather be up and about, heading out the back of the house to see how the horses are."

The business he refers to is Shabra Plastics, a recycling company he runs along with Rita Shah, the Kenyan woman who owns most of the horses he trains and the other person at the table as we talk. In a decades-gone former life, Brady used to work for her father in Kenya and when he returned to Ireland in 1986 with the intention of setting up his own business, Shah came with him and never left. As well as producing 80 per cent of Ireland's refuse sacks and being a winner of the prestigious Entrepreneur Of The Year award, she holds the distinction - such as it is - of surely being the only Kenyan on the planet with a Monaghan accent.

"We were concerned about it, you know?"

she says. "We didn't know whether he should slow down and let some things go or keep going like he always did. But he just wants to do so much and he isn't going to let cancer stop him.

He's so positive. I'll tell you this one and you'll love it. We were driving back from Dublin last week and the doctor had prescribed him a simple E45 cream to rub on himself if he came up with any side effects or rashes or anything like that. And we were in the car and he was looking at the cream and he goes, 'I wonder would this be any good on the horse?'" Brady shrugs as if it was the most natural question in the world to ask. "See, I would normally have used Sudocream but the doctor gave me this stuff because it has more healing power in it without having anything in it that could irritate or whatever. Baron De Feypo ran in soft ground on Sunday and since then he's developed a little bit of a mud rash on the back of his hooves. So I used this cream on it and it did the trick. Because of it, he'll run in the Pierse Hurdle on Sunday.

He's a massive price, around 66-1 I'd say.

That's some each way bet, I'll tell you."

This is the stuff that excites him. A nice touch and a bookie humbled would shorten any man's winter but Brady has always thought in louder colours than that. He took a fortune home from Cheltenham in 1981 when he stuck three horses - Sea Pigeon (6-1), Willie Wumpkins (13-2) and Little Owl (7-4) - into three cross doubles and a treble and came out the other end with enough to buy the land in Ballybay that he would later train a small stock of horses on. In the two decades since he took out his training licence, his inmates have seldom numbered more than 15 at any one time. He currently has eight running and the same again being readied for the summer.

The last while has been hard, though. When he says the cancer hasn't slowed him down, it's partly true but it's also partly aspirational. Although his was always a yard known more for the surprise coup than the sustained success, six months is still a brutal stretch to go without a win. Especially when the need for a bit of harmless diversion is pulling out of you like a child at a funfair.

"Between getting up and down here and coming and going, I wasn't just getting at the training full time. And I'm still not at it full time. I do what I can here and there but it's just had to take a back seat I suppose. I still get up and see the horses first thing every morning and go round with the feed and that but the problem is that I'm always away out of the house and up here for the treatment and I don't get back until later in the evening. After I leave here, I've to go to Blackrock because I have a heart problem as well as the cancer so it'll leave me that I won't be able to get anything done when I get back tonight. But I have a good staff there, two girls and three boys and they look after everything for me."

Last Sunday was like a blast from a bellows around the place. He's properly bullish about Baron De Feypo's chances of a follow-up this afternoon and is already looking ahead two months to the festival that has been a part of his life for as long as he's had one to remember.

"If I had a winner at Cheltenham, I'd die happy, no question. I'd think I'd have done it all at that stage. It's the one thing that I'd love more than anything. I've had some great days with the horses and some big ones but if I could get a win at Cheltenham, that would be the ultimate. This will be the fourth year I've brought horses there and I've had a second, two thirds and a fourth. I'll probably bring three over this year. You never know how things could turn out."

Not with horses. Not with anything.