So we arrive by ambulance at UCH with me laughing hysterically
while slowly losing the use of my left hand side. On arrival I go straight in for scans and then
the waiting game begins. I was being
looked after by the stroke team who had the unenviable task of letting me know
that the good news was that I hadn’t had a stroke but that the scans had found
a “mass” in my brain that was 3cm x 4cm x 2.5cm. Bugger. A couple of phone calls later and my parents
were booked on flights. I was
transferred to a ward and started on a dose of steroids (not the muscle
building kind, these ones just make your face swell and eat everything in sight,
hence the new nickname 'Moonface#). That
was on Saturday 11th October and I soon found out that I would be
operated on asap which turned out to be four days later.
On the night before my surgery I was transferred to the
National Neurological Hospital where I first met my anaesthetist and
surgeon. I was told to get a good night’s
sleep but that was impossible as one of the other patients kept crying out “Oh
bloody hell, help! Help me!”...until they wheeled him unwillingly into a room
on his own :) Up at 6am to have a wash
with antiseptic soap in order to fight off infection during the operation. I was taken in to the theatre by mid-morning
having signed the waivers that the procedure could do anything from leave me
brain dead to kill me outright. After
they had given me a ‘skull flap’ and accessed my brain they woke me up again
and started asking me to do things in order to assess the effect of the surgery
on my brain. I spoke a lot about whisky
and Real Tennis and at one point I tried to order a double macchiato because I
was feeling so sleepy. I remember
thinking that I should really shut up as while I was boring them with stories
about Real Tennis they were supposed to be concentrating on removing an angry
badger from my brain. Four hours later
and it was all over. George Samandouras
and his team were able to successfully remove 90% of the tumour, the remaining
10% could not be removed safely as the tumour was growing out of, and not on,
my brain so there was no clear line between it and the stuff that ideally I
wanted to keep. I decided I was going to
retrain to 10% left behind on learning a foreign language or all of the obscure
two letter Scrabble words.
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