It was a Monday. I was at work.
I'd felt wobbly for a few days. My balance had been off and I'd noticed a struggle with driving that I'd been quietly ignoring. That morning, typing had become a real challenge — my left hand wasn't cooperating in the way it should. I'd spoken to IT about installing a transcription tool to give my left hand a rest. The request was declined on security grounds, though someone found me a partial workaround. I hadn't pushed it. I'm not one to lay things on thick, and if I'm honest, I hadn't quite joined the dots about what the symptoms might mean.
I should explain where I was in life at that point. My role is Chief Marketing Officer at an IT company with offices across the UK — a business that's been going since 1991 and that I genuinely love. I sit on the board alongside three other directors, looking after a team of around a hundred people. Marketing is something I care about, something I find genuinely exciting, and the people I work with make it easy to want to show up every day. It's a good job. A really good job.
That Monday was the first time in a while that I hadn't felt great going in.
I was preparing for my regular review with my manager Joanne. I'd pre-written some notes acknowledging that I wasn't feeling myself — that we knew there had been a cancer diagnosis, that we were waiting for the melanoma to be removed, but that we didn't yet have a clear plan of action. Joanne, as always, was completely understanding.
We'd barely started talking when my phone rang.
It was a lady called Sharon, from Castle Hill Hospital. I remember her words exactly.
"Phil, have you driven here today? Have you driven anywhere?"
Yes, I said. I drove to work.
"You can't drive anymore. It's been found in your brain. You need to come into Castle Hill straight away so we can have a chat about it."
A wave of terror hit me unlike anything I'd ever felt. When someone tells you it's reached your brain, your mind goes to one place and one place only. I was convinced, in that moment, that I had weeks to live. It was impossible to think anything else.
I phoned Lucy immediately. Then I went back to Joanne's office and told her too. I couldn't drive — that much was now clear — but Joanne didn't hesitate. She'd take me. We'd sort the car out later. I remember my first thought being entirely practical: how the hell am I going to get my car back? That's just how my brain works, even in crisis. We figured it out quickly and set off for Castle Hill, about twenty minutes away.
It felt like hours.
Lucy arrived within ten or fifteen minutes of us getting there. Joanne handed me over and headed home. A doctor met me and took me into a room — Room 4 — where he began asking what felt, at the time, like strangely simple questions.
Where had I come from? Where did I live? Who lived there with me? Did I know why I was there?
He tested the strength on my left side — the weakness I hadn't mentioned to anyone, hadn't really admitted to myself. Looking back, of course, the questions weren't strange at all. He was assessing how far the brain tumours had progressed. How much they were already affecting my thinking, my movement, my awareness. I knew what was happening. I just didn't know what was coming next.
After that initial assessment, Sharon — the same woman who had made the phone call — sat down with me and Lucy and explained the situation clearly and calmly.
Six brain tumours. Known as metastases — meaning they had travelled from the original cancer site. The melanoma had also spread to my spleen and my adrenal glands. The brain was the priority. If those lesions continued to grow, the consequences could be severe.
She walked us through the options. Immunotherapy. Radiotherapy. A procedure called Gamma Knife radiosurgery — a precise, targeted treatment that would essentially blast the lesions in the brain to destroy them, before moving on to address everything else systematically.
No one mentioned a life expectancy that day. I don't know whether that was out of kindness, or professionalism, or simply because it was too early to say. But sitting in that room, I felt the weight of it all the same. The unspoken thing hung in the air between all of us.
We waited for an emergency MRI scan. By two or three in the afternoon we were told it couldn't be fitted in that day — we'd need to come back tomorrow. I was sent home.
Lucy and I drove back largely in silence. We had decisions to make. We didn't know what to tell the children. We didn't know quite how to hold what we'd just been told, let alone how to prepare for what came next. What we did know was that the next few days were going to bring news that would change the shape of our lives.
We just didn't yet know by how much.
