Waiting for time

So its me, Brad, I'm back and im not writing to you from the other side of the grave. I have been through two sets of surgery and they have been both been the two scariest moments of my life. I have never been one for nostlagia or reflection, but when you are lying on a table waiting to have someone tinker around in your brain, you think about a lot of things. The biopsy was the smaller of the two operations and I was fortunate enough that I was discharged from Hospital the afternoon of my surgery. That was good news because as much as I respect hospitals and the tremendous of good that they do, I can honestly say that the noises you hear in those hospitals will wake you up from any medicated sleep you may be in. Once I had been discharged from the hospital after the surgery, I basically sprinted out the doors in some sort of medicated attempt at not recognizing my own frailty. That time would come.


All I had to do to ensure I could go home was to walk down corridor, and I knew I would be able to do it. Walk, I do that everyday... except its a little different when someone has been poking and prodding microscopic instruments in your brain. With all of that going on, all I wanted to do when I awoke from surgery was speak to the people who mean the most to me. Those few seconds that hear their voices gives the enough courage to go through the operation a thousand times. Those people are the one whohave kept me ticking through this whole ordeal and I could never have done it without you. I have learnt so much about myself these last few weeks, but almost more than anything else, I have learnt peoples unbelievable compassion for others who are undergoing moments of hardship. People I have never met in my life appeared, and they did not just appear, they went out of their way to ensure that they were there for me because somehow, my story reached them and they saw it out of their kindness of their heart to come and support me. I personally want to thank Victoria and Barry Behr, and Janet Brown. Those 3 people went out of their way to offer any service that they could. I had never met these people before, yet they made sure that we met and that they parted with gifts that exceeded anything I could have ever asked for. These are the moments that made everything a little easier, when you hear that familiar South African accent, or a common talk of home. Thank you once again.

So now that the biopsy was done, it was back to the hotel and the waiting game slowly begins to tighten its grip around my neck as I begin to talk less and less frequently. I know what the biopsy's function was, and I needed to find out the results, except Dr Harsh will only receive the results the following day, and that is with all his reputation trying to force it out of the pathology labs. So once we get back to the hotel, I chat to friends and catch up on what we can, as it appears that I lost another day to surgery. It was the beginning of a week that I lost, but gained so much more in the process, I just didnt know it yet.

We wake up on the Wednesday morning. I am feeling good considering I underwent surgery the previous day, that was until I tried to wee. The catheter is perhaps my least liked equipment, it is an aid shoved up your gentlemens area in order to aid the process of urinating during surgery and times of incapacitation. They did not prep me for this part of recovery, everything seems raw and is exceedingly painful to pee... But I have to get it out, even though it results in me being double bent. Wednesday slowly filters by, as we eagerly wait for results of the pathology reports. We know that Griff is in surgery from 11am until 8pm that evening, and we need to stay close to my phone as it is his direct line. With every passing second, I begin to scratch away at my biopsy dressing, and I can feel that there is something in the pipeline. I constantly ask my parents if todays surgery was the last one, as chemo and radiation begin to show up as the likely options. Phew, chemo and radiation, it was a hard reality accepting these, not because I am afraid of them or because I am afraid of losing my hair, I am not. They are just harsh realities to accept as it therefore means, You Have Cancer and you need these two things to rid your body of this disease.

In an attempt to forget about what is going on and what time it is, we go for dinner... although we can all feel our eyes being drawn to the little black device that will speak the direction of treatment.

7:30 and Griff calls, I hand the phone to my dad and he takes it outside, after about 5 minutes of conversation he comes back inside pulling the thumbs up, he says "Its a low grade two,but you have a decision to make", oh dear, more decisions for me to make. The last ones werent particularly easy, so I didnt have a good feeling about this one. My dad informs me that it is a low grade two which means low malignancy. The flip side of this is that Griff wants me on the table again tomorrow morning at 7:15, just when I was looking forward to a sleep in because my parents said we werent having any more operations. My dad also tells me that Griff wants to chat to me to get my opinion of this whole thing. I have no where near to the qualifications required in order to speak to this man about neuro surgery, so what ever he recommends, I am going ahead with.

My alarm didnt need to be set, I knew it was 4am as I could hear the minutes of my life draw over my body. It was a very surreal feeling, waking up on a day that could have been my last, and it was commissioned by me, my name was on the indemnity form that I signed stating that I give them permission to go ahead and cut my head open in order to get to the middle of this whole thing. I yet again skype with loved ones and make phone calls prior to getting to the hospital. Those last few calls are ones that I need to store in me during the next few hours that I would be asleep, I needed them to give me fight and help to keep me calm. The preop admissions are the exact same as the biopsy, except that I am now seated on bed 1, which is pole position bed or the one situated by the main Operating Room, the one with all the big fancy machines. I lie in bed 1 getting poked again, and it draws on me that today could very really be my last day, but as quickly as that fear arises, i wash it out and remove it from my though. my family and i have come half way around the world to see the best, and these guys see thousands of cases like mine everyday... wrong! my case is a pineal tumor that account for 1% of brain tumors, so that changed things a bit for me,but it didnt change my outlook on this whole thing, i maintained my though process and i knew why i was there. I lay on the bed and was constantly kept aware of my parents, and they tried their best to keep my mind busy. 7 am comes around a lot sooner than thought and I am aware that I have 15 minutes before being wheeled in, because these guys run according to the clock.

So I speak to my sisters for one last time before I take a scheduled 7 hour sleep, and I speak to Alice and Brenty and they wish me a goodnight sleep. Finally my transport arrives and they wheel me off. Fear is quickly washed out by the drugs that begin to circulate around my body, I feel a sense of numbness, as I realise that this is the moment I have been building up to since I was diagnosed with the brain tumor. I am here to take this thing out, and I would rather die trying to take it out, than let it kill me, at least it would be on my terms that we both die.

I hobble over to OR room 1, operating table 1. The machinery in this room is mind blowing and I cannot begin to understand what each machine in there is for, but i can liken it to a symphony and that each piece has its music to play. The anasthetic begins to ring ever truer in my ears, my eyes become light and before I know it 7 hours of my life pass by in a blink. And it turns out it was an eventful 7 hours. They lost parts of my motor neurons on my left hand side from working, along with taking out a large area of the tumor. With all of this happening, all I hear is my welcoming voices of my parents as they try to coax me out of the sleep I have been in. I hug them and am so grateful that they are there with me for this, Its a very defining feeling, knowing you have climbed the mountain, and run down the other side, I had climbed my mountain, I had let Dr Harsh and his team work in the deepest parts of my brain, and they achieved what they set out to, and one of them was even kind enough to give me a haircut during the occasion.

I am still healing from the surgery one week on, but I am so grateful that I had it. These surgeons do not realize how massively they are changing peoples lives on a daily basis. This whole surgery procedure catapults me back in to ICU and under the protection of some incredible nurses. These are the people that keep the hospitals going as they seek to answer every groan and movement with a remedy. My fight with this monster is not over yet,