After the shock of day one, and the MRI that never happened, we were back at Castle Hill the following morning.
We took the kids to school at the normal time. Nothing unusual, nothing alarming — just a regular school run. At that point they knew I'd been poorly and that tests were ongoing, but nothing more than that. We weren't ready to tell them anything else until we knew more ourselves.
We arrived at the Acute Medical Assessment Unit at around half past nine and were asked to wait. The MRI scan was the priority — that would tell us what was happening in my brain, and from there the team could begin to map out what came next.
The waiting room in a cancer acute assessment unit is a strange place. I'm not sure sombre is quite the right word. It's more neutral than that — a kind of suspended quiet, people trying to be present and ordinary in circumstances that are anything but. You could tell who the patients were from the cannulas and the wristbands, but not from any obvious outward distress. Everyone was just... waiting.
Then a nurse popped her head round the door and switched on a television mounted on the wall that nobody had noticed.
This Morning came on.
The feature playing was an interview with a man who had been diagnosed with penile cancer. He was talking, in considerable detail, about his diagnosis, his treatment plan, and the fact that a significant portion of his penis would need to be surgically removed.
The room, already quiet, went briefly and magnificently silent.
Then came the murmurs. Then, slowly, the giggles. Because when you're sitting in a cancer waiting room at half past nine in the morning and that is what appears on the television, there is really only one appropriate response — and it isn't tears.
Someone suggested there must be something better on. The World Snooker Championship was on at the time, and I proposed we switch over. Universal agreement. I went to reception, explained the situation — which they found equally amusing — and a nurse came and changed the channel.
We settled in to watch snooker.
It didn't escape my notice that both players on screen were completely bald. I was still early enough in my cancer journey that I hadn't given too much thought to what treatment might do to my hair. But sitting there in an oncology waiting room, watching two bald men play snooker after being subjected to a segment about penile cancer removal, felt like the universe was making some kind of point. Nobody complained. In context, two bald snooker players was practically uplifting.
A couple of hours passed. I was eventually called down for my MRI scan — blood tests and observations done, and once again a friend in radiology had made sure things were properly organised and on time. I'd heard stories about MRI machines. The noise, the claustrophobia, the general unpleasantness. None of the descriptions had made me look forward to it.
Before going in I was asked a series of questions I hadn't anticipated. Had I ever had a shrapnel injury? Had I ever swallowed a bead camera? Was I pregnant? Was I breastfeeding? I suppose when you're about to be slid inside what is essentially a very powerful magnet, they need to cover every possibility.
Once inside, my head was wedged into a tight brace with earplugs and rigid side supports. I was slid into the machine. I was told it would take around twenty to thirty minutes.
The noise was extraordinary. Huge, relentless, rhythmic blasts of sound, impossible to ignore, impossible to think clearly through. I did what I could — I ran through football tactics in my head, working through positions and formations for Dale Park Rangers, trying to stay somewhere useful mentally. It helped, but only so much. The machine just kept going. And going. And going.
After about twenty minutes I was slid back out, injected with contrast dye, and told there were another seven or eight minutes remaining. For those final minutes I counted down from sixty, over and over — seven times, eight times — just to feel the time passing. It was the only thing that worked.
And then it was over.
I sincerely hoped I'd never have to do it again. I knew, of course, that I absolutely would.
We returned to the assessment unit to wait for results. A couple of hours later I was called in by a doctor we have since come to refer to simply as Nice Doctor — officially Dr Khan. He lived up to the name immediately. When he noticed me getting visibly upset at one point, he paused and showed me something I hadn't noticed — a star-shaped scar on his temple. When he was a child, he told me, he had been impaled on a spike there. Doctors had said he would never walk, never talk.
He hadn't stopped talking since.
It was a small thing. But small things matter enormously in moments like that.
Dr Khan told me there were some bleeds on some of the brain lesions — not unexpected, and manageable with medication. My blood tests were otherwise okay. I could go home with steroids and the appropriate medication, and if anything got worse I should call and come back immediately.
That was how day two ended. We drove home, and that night Lucy and I talked about what to tell the children. I wanted to get it done — I've never been someone who sits comfortably with things left unsaid. But we agreed to wait until Friday, when we would meet my oncologist Dr Ranatunge for the first time. She would explain the full plan, and then we would relay that to Flo and Albert properly. Better to tell them once, with something concrete to hold onto, than to alarm them with half a picture.
We went to bed not knowing quite what came next.
But for the first time since the phone call, we had a date to aim for. Friday. The plan.
