Mr Timothy Jones 2016-12-11 Person 5 5 0

My husband and I first met Tim in October 2015 a few weeks after being told by the stroke unit in St George's that my seizure wasn't due to a stroke, it was due to a brain tumour. Meeting Tim was great as he treated us like the intelligent, professional people that we are which made the whole situation easier to deal with from our side. We are a couple in our late 20s who approach everything in life (including brain tumours) with an evidence based factual approach rather than simply with emotion. We became frustrated in the stroke unit as they seemed to be perplexed at why we weren't panicking automatically when they said I actually had a brain tumour (without any further information given), so it was a relief to eventually get to be treated by someone like Tim... even though managing the administration of St George's (and the NHS in general) is a full time job in itself. That said, I imagine that if the patient and their support network needed more "emotional" or less facts based care then I imagine that Tim would be good there too. It became clear at the first meeting that he felt an awake craniotomy was the best way to proceed but there was no rush as we (and Tim) were getting married in early 2016 which we wanted to do before the operation, given there was no knowing how I would be after the surgery and it was a suspected low grade giloma on the frontal lobe which (fortunately) was not going anywhere fast. Studies on the tumour after the surgery showed it was a WHO grade II astrocytoma and around 95%+ of it was removed, which is a great success. I had the operation in early May 2016. Tim and the others in his team were great (including the anaesthetist Ashleigh who took photos of my brain and emailed them to me), and by that point I just wanted the whole thing to be over so that we could just deal with the next stage rather than talking about the unknown. Tim was also great with my hair - he shaved a 1cm strip next to my parting so after the staples were removed I could style my hair as I had done previously so that no one knew I had a scar/no hair. I am incredibly lucky in the sense that so far there hasn't really been any impact on my life. After the initial recovery period of about a week (where my mood was very subdued and I was very tired, as Tim had warned me) I became "back to normal" and returned to work within 6 weeks, doing reduced hours for a further 2 months. 7 months afterwards we have met with Tim a few times, and will continue to do so at intervals but at the moment I am just having MRIs until the tumour returns. He's also very responsive to emails, which is great. I assume that any readers of this will be reading it as either they themselves or someone they care about has a brain tumour and is possibly facing surgery. The stats that the charities use to raise funds are really really scary, particularly given a lot of people will be under 40, probably perfectly healthy in every other way and in the "prime" of their life. This last 18 months has given us a completely different perspective on life, but not everyone has it as bad as you will read in the Evening Standard or see on posters on the tube. I know we probably will not be so lucky at some point in the future... but right now, we're just living our lives as normal. Tim's professional approach to my care has been a great help in maintaining that normality and perspective.