We arrived at Thornbury Hospital just before seven in the morning.
It didn't feel like a hospital. Not in the way I'd come to know hospitals over the preceding weeks. We were shown quickly into a private room — comfortable, calm, more like a hotel suite than a ward. A drinks fridge sat fully stocked in the corner: water, Irn Bru, Coca Cola, orange juice. We were told that after the frame had been fitted, we'd be given a cooked breakfast. There was one other patient in the building that morning, also there for Gamma Knife, with a single lesion to treat. A more straightforward case than mine. They would go first, and I would wait.
I didn't mind waiting. I wasn't in any rush to have a metal frame screwed into my skull.
The frame — or mask, as they sometimes called it — is the foundation of the whole procedure. It gets fixed to the head in four places, pinned directly into the skull, to ensure absolute precision during treatment. I'd been told it was uncomfortable but manageable. The worst bit of the day, but not as bad as it sounds.
They were right, mostly. You could feel each point as it was tightened — a firm, reverberating pressure, a series of clicks that travelled through the bone and into the brain. Click. Click. Click. Strange isn't a strong enough word. But after ten or fifteen minutes the pressure settled, and it became something you simply existed alongside rather than something you were fighting.
Some strong pressure on the brain, but this soon alleviated after ten, fifteen minutes, and it felt okay. Very strange. But okay.
Breakfast was slightly more complicated. The cafe had been due to provide a full English, but things were running behind and by the time we got to it, the kitchen was winding down. We ended up with the leftovers — eggs, bacon, sausages, the remnants of what had been on offer earlier. Given that I was wearing a metal frame bolted to my head and about to have brain radiosurgery, I was fairly happy with whatever was going.
After breakfast, we waited. The team disappeared to plan the treatment — plotting exactly where the radiation would be delivered for each of the six lesions, feeding the measurements from the MRI into the software, mapping the day. This took two or three hours. Lucy and I sat together in the room, talked a bit, sat in silence a bit, drank things from the fridge.
Eventually a member of the team came to speak to me about the plan. I asked about the lesion near the optic nerve — the one that had concerned me since Dr Ranatunge first mentioned it. They were relaxed about that one, they said. It was accessible and straightforward to treat.
It was the largest lesion they were more focused on. The one near the motor cortex. Since the last MRI scan it had grown slightly. And treating it, they told me, carried a risk — a small but real risk of triggering a brain seizure.
Less than one percent, they said. But increasing ever so slightly given the growth.
The alternative was physical brain surgery to remove it. They believed they should proceed with the Gamma Knife. I agreed without hesitation. We put the mask back on, I was helped onto the treatment table, and we began.
I'd downloaded podcasts and an audiobook in preparation. Podcasts, it turned out, were the right choice — each one roughly an hour long, giving me a reliable sense of time passing. After the first one finished I knew I was an hour in. After the second I was heading toward two hours. Progress. Manageable.
About two hours in, a voice came through the intercom. Five of the six lesions had been treated. Only the largest one remained. It would take approximately an hour and forty minutes. Would I like to use the bathroom before they started, given that stopping midway through treating a lesion wasn't advisable?
I would.
I came back, got settled, and made a decision I would come to slightly regret — I switched from podcasts to an audiobook. Alan Partridge: Nomad. I'd listened to it four years earlier and had somehow managed to forget this entirely until I was already lying in the machine, unable to do anything about it.
The last hour and forty minutes took forever.
Without the anchor of knowing how long each chapter lasted, time became elastic and unhelpful. I had no idea how far through I was. I made it to chapter four or five before the urge to ask how long was left became too strong to resist.
Four minutes, they said.
I started crying immediately. Still in the machine. I couldn't help it.
When they finally slid me out, I was in pieces.
Three hours and forty minutes. The longest three hours and forty minutes of my life. When I was brought back to the room where Lucy was waiting, I broke down completely. It was the first time — through every scan, every result, every difficult conversation — that I had really, truly cried. Not quietly. Properly. The weight of how serious everything actually was landed all at once and I couldn't hold it anymore.
The team gave us around twenty minutes before coming in to debrief. Everything had gone to plan, they said. As far as they were concerned it had been a success. But they spoke directly to Lucy about what to watch for that night. The risk of a brain seizure. Less than one percent. They went through the signs. What to do if it happened.
I felt okay. I felt fine. We headed home.
We were slightly late picking up the kids — another favour called in, another friend stepping up. We got home, settled into the evening. Some family time, some television. Normal life trying to reassert itself after an abnormal day.
But my left side was weaker than it had been. Noticeably so. I was still trying to do everything myself — that's just how I'm wired — but the weakness was impossible to ignore as the evening went on.
The first time I needed to get up in the night, Lucy came to help me. The second time, I decided to try alone.
I got up. I made it to the bathroom. But as I went to sit down, something gave way. I fell sideways, landing hard against a large chest of drawers beside the toilet, scraping my side on the way down. I couldn't get up.
Lucy heard the noise and came in. I should have asked for help earlier. I knew that. It was too late now. She helped me back toward the bed.
And that's when it started.
A strange draining feeling. I made it to the edge of the bed. I reached for something to steady myself. And then I was gone.
I remember almost nothing of what followed.
Lucy remembers everything.
I fell onto the bed. She watched me lose consciousness. I started convulsing. Foaming at the mouth. She called 999. The paramedics arrived — I have no memory of them coming, no memory of the room filling with people — and I was taken by ambulance to Hull Royal Infirmary while Lucy followed in the car behind.
I remember fragments of arriving. The grogginess. The strange foggy sense of the world being slightly out of reach. The feeling that everything happening was real in a way it hadn't quite felt before.
Within a few hours things began to stabilise. I was coming back to myself. And in that window — groggy, slightly delirious, not entirely in command of my faculties — I spotted someone across the room.
Shaun. A friend of mine. A paramedic, working that night.
I shouted across the ward: "Shaun — I need a poo."
It was probably not his area of expertise. But he found someone who could help. I was also, somewhere in the chaos of that night, fitted with a catheter — a horrible experience I will not linger on, except to say that by midnight the pressing issue had been resolved.
A few hours later I was transferred to Castle Hill Hospital. I was given a bed. A rather nice man called Alan was in the bed opposite.
The longest day was over.
