The Day My World Changed

Thank you for taking this walk with me – my name is Sam. I am 34 and was born, lived, studied and worked in London all my life. On Tuesday 4th Feb 2020 (a day which I call my “Revival”!), I left work early to get myself home as I wasn’t quite feeling myself. Upon reflection, I hadn’t really been feeling myself for a couple of days but I had put it down to the fact that maybe I was just a little run down. In the week leading up to 4th Feb there were 3 or 4 occasions where I noticed a weird chemical smell that came out of nowhere and would go after 30 seconds but I didn’t feel like it was significant enough to even mention. In hindsight I should’ve probably told my wife or GP but I just assumed it was my mind playing tricks on me (ironically it kind of was!). BUT on that Tuesday, the smell completely engulfed my senses and just wouldn’t go away – I knew something wasn’t right. I jumped on the Northern Line train to get myself home, closed my eyes to get some rest but the next 48 hours are completely blank to me…

I had collapsed on the tube and had a grand mal seizure which I had never had before (a grand mal seizure – also known as a tonic-clonic seizure – is where you lose consciousness and have uncontrollable jerking and shaking of your whole body). A kind member of the public pulled the passenger alarm and we stopped at Balham station. I believe this was God’s grace as the closest hospital to this station is St George’s which has a well renowned Neurosurgery centre (also close to my home). I was received at the station by some amazing TFL staff and paramedics who helped me off the train. Whilst in the ambulance on my way to the hospital I had 2 more grand mal seizures and somewhere in the chaos I dislocated my right shoulder (typically me, can’t just have a seizure, always going the extra mile!). My wife happened to call my mobile while I was in the ambulance and according to her, she thought I’d spent the afternoon in the pub! The Paramedic was kind enough to explain what was going on to her. I’ve never really reflected on how she must have felt at this point until writing this, but being the loving wife and brilliant doctor that she is, I can imagine it was a mixture of fear, panic and symptom analysis that were whirring through her mind.

Initially nobody knew what was wrong with me and I underwent a number of scans and tests. The first trail of thought was could this be Encephalitis? Encephalitis is an inflammation of one of the brain layers usually caused by an infection, which can still be very serious but also treatable. A CT scan in A&E came back with conflicting reports – one junior radiologist was worried about a “highly suspicious lesion” (a term docs use to politely say crappy tumour or cancer!) but was overridden by the consultant radiologist who said more likely Encephalitis – Phew, we thought! While I was waiting to have my MRI scan (a lot of emergency scans that day meant I was unable to have one done immediately) they did a lumbar puncture to see if they could confirm this. This is where they take a sample of brain fluid through a needle in your spine but the results came back completely normal. My wife didn’t tell me at the time but this is when her world shattered. I just assumed the more normal the results were the better, little did I know that this meant they were excluding every other cause of these seizures, making the diagnosis that we all feared the most more likely. Eventually it was the MRI on the Thursday morning that confirmed our worst fears. This was a brain tumour. A big one. It wasn’t a clean round mass but more like a web – any of you Marvel fans like me might like an analogy to Spider-Man’s web… That’s what it honestly looked like… a web that was coating over my normal brain tissue. Except I didn’t have any super powers. I had a tumour in my brain.

God works in mysterious ways as the Neurologist on call that day was my dad’s cousin and he found the courage to come and personally break the news to me in the kindest way possible. To be honest the moment I heard the words “Brain Tumour” it felt like life stopped, I don’t really remember what he said after that – I thought that was it for me, I was going to die within a few days and I would never get to see my daughters grow up.

It took a few days to process those words, but what it really meant was that my eyes had been opened properly for what felt like the first time…