Surviving Brain Cancer in a Precarious World

Part 19: The Greasy Housing Ladder...

Despite the disappointment of Brexit, the summer of 2016 had some brilliant weather for a British summer. This gave me plenty of time to improve my fitness and recover from the stresses from earlier that year.

After all the craziness in the news, the final straw for me was when The Bank of England cut interest rates from 0.5% to 0.25% which was the first cut since 2009. I decided to give up watching or listening to it for a while and concentrate on my fiancée and me our first house.

We had been looking at old ones around Chester for some time but I didn’t want to be too far from Bangor where my place of work is. My fiancée was also still learning to drive and with me being unable to drive for another year and a half, I knew that I couldn’t realistically move us both too far from Chester where she had a job and would be driving sooner than I would again.

In the end, we came to a compromise that we would look for a place in Wales but closer to the border with Cheshire. After a simple zoom at the area on google maps and typing in new homes, up popped a new development in Flintshire.
We had already failed to get a place in Broughton because they had incompatible restrictions on shared ownership meaning you would either need to have family already living in Flintshire or of worked there for over 3 years.

When we went to visit the newer development which was deeper into Wales, we fell in love with the show home and were told that there was only 1 of the same left on the estate. We went away and got our finances sorted out before reserving under some pressure because there were already other couples roaming the development and we knew the last one was in our budget.

Once we reserved we felt very excited but at the same time knowing we couldn’t hang about given my uncertain future. The next week became the one of the most stressful since before my first clear scan. My credit rating had always been high so it was a shock to learn I had been turned down for the mortgage. The financial advisor had no idea why and recommended I investigate online.

My credit rating had been obliterated to one of the worst levels making it impossible to get the most basic levels of credit. When I checked my report it was red flagging the car lone for the vehicle I had to get rid of during radiotherapy.
I was distraught because I had been told on the phone by the company managing the loan that the rest of the debt would be written off considering my terminal diagnosis and loss of license.

When I rang them to find out why they had not actually followed through with this, they played dumb as if they had never said it and made me aware that I was in serious debt with them. I ended up in floods of tears realising that because of my situation, I had ruined things for me and my fiancée. No one was home at the time so I had to make several depressing calls to my loved ones explaining what had happened.

After taking some time to calm down and taking their advice on challenging the lenders for allowing this to happen, I got them to investigate the very call where they had promised to write off the rest of the debt. The problem was, we needed my credit rating to be corrected soon or the house would come out of its reserve window and we would lose it.
When the credit rating agency explained it might not in time, I felt hopeless because at this stage I didn’t know if the investigation would be finished by the end of the day and I was against the clock getting the ok for the mortgage.

As is often the case in an unforgiving economy, I ran out of time that day as the car loan lenders were dragging heals on their investigation. That evening I felt lousy because I had been under stress for most of the day and I felt a huge amount of guilt that my fiancée had been caught up in this too because I know she loved the house as much as me.
Lots of plan B’s crossed my mind like renting and irrational negative thoughts such as it must be a sign that it wasn’t to be because I wouldn’t have a future due to my health situation.

The next day I tried to approach the situation in a more rational manner. I got through to the ombudsmen and took their advice on how to deal with the car lender after they had not come good on what they said they would. I also contacted the mortgage lender to explain why I needed extra time and given our situation they kindly accepted to extend our deadline. Later that day I was not feeling great having not slept well with all my worries so I crashed on the sofa after I took my cocktail of daily supplements.

I woke up to a phone call from the lender explaining they had found the phone call and were indeed wrong not to have cleared the rest of the debt off or not ring me at any stage after that the loan was still active. It turned out they were sending the invoices to my old address despite me having updated them when I had to get rid of the car.
They agreed to undo all the damage and clear it from my name. Before I could let myself relax fully, I rushed to call the mortgage lender to explain the car lenders decision and by the end of the day, we were finally back on track.

Had they of lost that recorded call, no doubt we would have lost the house and been unable to do anything but rent because they expected the car re-payments to restart start immediately while my credit rating was still in the doldrums.
When the mortgage was finally accepted, we went to visit the build of it, I could feel a sense of hope coming back to me as well as my nagging inner voice telling me “always get everything in writing, in future!”

With it being late summer I was concentrating hard on making the most of the Sun to get my vitamin D levels as high as possible with plenty of grounding and working out in the garden with both yoga and dumbbell lifting.

As July ended I had to go for my second post-treatment MRI. This time I decided to order the MRI DVD for the post after the scan so that I could add it to my vlog. I was also curious as to how it all looked now so I compared it to my pre-treatment MRI so I ordered both. I wasn’t aware that the current MRI results report came with the DVD’s in the post so having read just the first line I panicked and tossed it away thinking I wasn’t ready to see it.

I snapped out of it and grabbed the letter again and shot my focus to the bottom of the page which read “Stable no recurrent disease”. In an instant, I felt all my stress from the previous few weeks lift from me as if nothing had happened.

I felt not just extremely thankful that I was still in the clear but relieved that I would be able to show up at the consultation appointment the next Friday, already knowing the result and more able think clearly about what questions I could ask.

When I checked the MRI DVD’s it took me awhile to get used to navigating through the images and work out where exactly all the damage was. When I got to the area where the tumour was, I was amazed at just how big the surgical cavity looked in my brain. My sick sense of humour would later use this to show why I had become a progressive, the “Tim nice but dim” part of my brain had clearly been removed.

When it was time to look at the pre-treatment but post-surgical MRI I was able to quickly get back to the same area of the brain and I could clearly see where the surgeon had tried to remove as much of the tumours tendrils as possible because at the ends of 2 cavity channels were tiny white dots.

These would have been what was left of the cancerous tumour after surgery that remained just inside my motor-cortex. They would have been the “deposits” or “nodules” that had been reported as completely disappeared from my first clear scan report that was filmed for the documentary Dying for Weed.

The image above shows the surgical cavity as it looked at this point because the images are always flipped because… humanity…silent letters etc. So the actual cavity is on the right side of my brain. My diagnosis scan showed this area lighter with a tiny white dot in the centre which would have been the most cancerous part of the 5cm mass that was there.

This time at the consultation appointment, we were able to ask lots more questions and get a plan together for the rest of the year. We ended by agreeing to keep my scans fairly regular and if the 3rd scan was also clear, we could look at extending the length of time between scans.

I was in 2 minds about this at the time because I was gathering increasing research from my friend in London that the radioactive dye used in scans “Gadolinium” can accumulate in the body over time and cause issues further down the road.

I was still uncertain of my future just being 2 scans clear but I was no less determined to live a normal lifespan regardless of what challenges lay ahead. So I was not only looking at ways I could improve my general health and recover but ensure I could do everything possible to negate the long-term problems from having radiotherapy to the brain. My 3rd scan was then booked for the end of August that year.