On 28th March 1996 I had my M.R.I. scan. We waited in the waiting room for half an hour, it wasn’t very fun. The doctor gave me a tablet to make me sleepy and it worked only I wouldn’t go to sleep. The reason they wanted me to go to sleep was because I had to keep very still, otherwise the pictures of my head would have been blurry. The scan was all right, it didn’t hurt a bit. Mummy stayed with me and the radiographer was very kind. The scanner looked a bit like a washing machine and it sounded like there were canaries inside.

After the scan the doctor talked to us and told us that the scan wasn’t normal and that we would have to see Dr. Nicholls again.

We were very sad because we were all afraid that it might be something very bad. I was worried that I would have to have an operation. Mummy and Daddy went to see Dr. Nicholls later that evening and she said I didn’t need an operation but I would need treatment, what I had was called a brain stem glioma, which is a kind of tumour. Your brain stem is the part of your brain right in the middle of your head and it controls your breathing and the blood going around your body. A tumour is like a ball of bad cells.

The following day we had to go to the Royal Marsden Hospital in Sutton to see a special team of doctors and nurses who would help me through my treatment.

I saw a doctor called Geoff and a nurse called Yvonne. They were very kind to us. The doctor in charge is called Mike, he is lovely. Geoff showed me the pictures of my head and where my tumour was. He also explained everything to me about the treatment and the hair loss which I will tell you about later. The tumour is in my brain stem and it was pinching some of my nerves. This meant the muscles on one side of my body weren’t working like they should have been, causing my smile to be crooked and my right side not to work as well as the left.

The treatment was radiotherapy, powerful x-rays, which we hoped would shrink the tumour and take away the symptoms.