Day trippin'...

Early start and we're flying off across mashed potato skys to London to meet Professor Nutting at The Royal Marsden Hospital. We arrive two hours early, but let them know we are here just in case there was a chance of being seen early. As I'm sat filling in forms I get a "No ID Caller" come through on my phone... it's Prof Nutting's secretary wanting to know where my most recent scan is, as it hasn't arrived at her office. I panic! I was told by the secretary at Trelisk that all info was forwarded last Friday. I'd spent four hours last Friday making sure that all the information needed had been passed on. If this scan isn't here in London it makes the whole trip pretty much invalid.
After a few minutes of calls to and from Trelisk Hospital the CT scans are found and sent over to The Marsden... and we both breathe a sigh of relief.
A glance around the waiting area, it's full of people from all over the place, different ages, colours, religions... whatever, pretty much all with cancer. It just hit home once again how indiscriminate it is. 2.30pm comes around and we are called in. Nutting introduces himself with a strong handshake and we get down to business. I didn't really expect much in the way of answers today as I knew that this would be more of an introduction as a "new patient", but he was quick to tell us the score. "You have to understand this is a very serious situation we are dealing with here". "When a tumor returns like this having been treated with Radio and Chemotherapy it becomes highly resistant to treatment".... I felt my throat tighten. "We are looking at surgery as the only possible method of cure in this instance".... okay, he said the magic word "cure"!
I had read pretty extensively about breakthrough treatment using endoscopic and robotic surgery techniques. A lot of them pioneered by a man called Peter Clarke who is based at TRM. It turns out Mr Clarke is the man I am being referred on to.
The first time I went through treatment I wasn't ever shown any of my scans or the images of my tumor... to be honest, I hadn't really wanted to see. Today was different... there it all was on the screen in glorious 3D, the inside of my head with the primary tumor illuminated with radioactive dye in the back of my nasal space about the size of a twenty pence piece just below my sinus cavity and brain. Nutting explained that we are "on the right side of a bad situation" due to the fact that the tumor is yet to move to bone or vital organs, is not yet in my brain and hasn't invaded my sinuses. He was quick to say that if that were the case we would then be looking at Chemotherapy only as a way of trying to control the tumor and extend life for as long a possible rather than getting rid of it for good...
I'm back there on Wednesday to meet Peter Clarke to discuss how it is all going to move forward with the operation and there was also a mention of the possible use of Cyberknife as a follow up treatment. This is an accurate single dose radiation treatment that will be used to unsure that nothing has been missed.
We shook hands and said goodbye.
We walked out of the waiting area and into the hallway. I was a bit numb to it all, it felt like I'd just had a 500 gigabytes of information downloaded into my head and there was an immediate need to process it before normal function could resume, I think Bethan felt the same... we needed a brew!
On the drive back to the airport I called my Mum and told her the news as I knew she would be sat in the front room of our house on her seventh cup of tea worried to death. The flight home was pretty sedate, though not physically tired, I think we both needed to give our brains a rest. It had been a day full of stress, worry, relief and excitement all rolled into one.
We arrived at home and I needed fresh air... I walked alone along the beach just as the light was dying off trying to process the day when I realised, I won't be doing Chemo! I will be able surf once I've got over the op. There's a really good chance that life won't be completely shut down for an entire year like that first time around. Things are still pretty scary, and I'm sitting here with cancer in the middle of my head, but it feels like things are looking up.