“A tumour which extends from the cerebellopontine angle to the geniculate ganglion along the left facial nerve.”

As a scrabble score, some of those words were dreamy.

From one of the world’s leading neurosurgeons looking at my brain, less so.

TLDR? Click here: Fundraising for Jersey Brain Tumour Charity

Once upon a time…

A few years ago, I woke up with a lack of hearing in my left ear. Nothing dramatic but a little like I was underwater. After a few days I still hadn’t managed to regain normal audio levels so pootled along to the GP expecting some gross ear wax to be extracted.

No sign of wax meant a trip to the hospital to sit in a booth, clicking a button every time a beep of varying pitches and tones came through the headphones. It’s a strange test at the best of times and you end up playing games in your own head as to whether you heard a tone or not with no feedback from the audiologist.

Turns out I wasn’t hearing a lot of the beeps at the higher end of the frequency range in my left ear only. It certainly gave me a good excuse for not hearing when I was asked to do chores!

The next trip to the hospital was to lie in a small chamber while an MRI clanged and bashed around loudly my head. Now I don’t like to brag but me and MRIs go way back. You’re looking at a multiple concussion-er going all the way back to playing football at primary school, through getting accidentally kicked in the head playing football, and being elbowed in the face…playing football. Aside from proving that football is dangerous, I also had a couple of MRIs for vertigo, and a benign tumour in my head which was removed under general anaesthetic.

Which is a long way of saying that I managed to fall asleep in the MRI machine at Jersey Hospital.

Luckily the plastic frame keeping my head in place did its job and I was soon sat down with an ENT doctor looking a black and white image of my brain. And on the left side of the image, as the doctor pointed out with pen, was a white lump, roughly 15mm in diameter.

Turns out, through those multiple MRIs that you were probably wondering I mentioned, that the lump could be traced back some time and had been growing all the while. No immediate alarm was forthcoming from the doctor but I was sent over to London to speak with a specialist who was similarly unruffled which meant a considered medical opinion of “let’s wait and see”.

Luckily there was a global pandemic in the meantime which meant there was nothing but waiting for not just me, but most of the world.

Fast forward a couple of years and a job change which left me a bit more deaf. The passing of time, not the new job.

Turns out that while the world had stopped for a bit, nobody had told my tumour. Which was a bit annoying. It had been growing at roughly one millimetre a year for the past seven years and there was only so much space in my skull that it could take up so it was pushing down on my audio nerve and getting pretty close to doing the same on my facial nerve.

The time for waiting and seeing was over.

Ain’t no option at all

“I really love doing surgery” is not something you really want to hear, even from a surgeon.

With the option to do nothing gone, the next choice was how best to battle something growing in my head.

Given the proximity to the stuff that controls my face, ideally I don’t want a scalpel anywhere near my tumour, despite how good the surgeon is and how much he loves surgery.

His actual suggestion sounded way cooler – Gamma Knife.

Presumably this meant some kind of green laser with worst coming to the worst, I would probably get superpowers. Or it was the name of a 1970s punk band. Either way it seemed the obvious way to go.

After a few months and a bit of research, it turned out that while it was still the best choice, the chance of side effects including increased strength seemed off the cards. I’d even worn an Incredible Hulk t-shirt for my procedure – a reference that was sadly lost on the medical team who were about to drill screws into my head.

Oh yeah, that part of the op was downplayed quite a bit.

Local anaesthetic was applied to four points, two on the front and two on the back of my head. A plastic frame was then slowly screwed into the points so that when I was in the Gamma Knife machine, I wouldn’t move my head and get the wrong bit of brain shot by the lasers. At least the lasers were real.

Imagine a vice slowly being tightened and your head is the thing inside it. And you really don’t want it to move during the process. I’ve had a lot better mornings. But at least there was tea and biscuits.

After that, the actual Gamma Knife operation was pretty simple. Technically called stereotactic radiosurgery, the op was a bit like a slightly less claustrophobic MRI and much quieter too. I basically got to lay down for just over an hour while a machine hummed around me.

I was then wheeled back out to get the screws loosened and you cannot begin to imagine the relief. A literal tension headache released with the untightening of four screws. Aside from a little weeping, they healed up pretty well and you can’t see any scars at all.

And except for a little bit of spaced-out-ness, I walked out of the hospital and straight to the hotel under my own steam.

I’m still waiting on the follow-up MRI as it takes six months to get a clear picture of any success in the operation but fingers crossed.

I’ve been extremely fortunate with all of my treatment and symptoms but some of my friends have been less lucky.

So that’s just under 1,000 words on why I am raising money for the Jersey Brain Tumour Charity. Not just for me in case I need them, but for the people that they have helped enormously and cannot continue to without fundraising.

I don’t normally like doing it but this time, I have a real and very present reason to support the cause. Any spare change you have would be incredibly gratefully received. Just click the picture of me below: