By this time next week I should have considerably less tumor behind my eyes. The surgery is called a transsphenoidal resection. They’ll go through my nose and remove as much of the tumor as they can without touching the carotid. Then I’ll recover for a while, and we should be able to use targeted radiation to kill the rest of it; the part that encases the artery.

This thing has been growing in my head for years. It’s likely been there longer than I’ve known my wife, before coronavirus, before the Brexit vote or the orange man’s first term, perhaps even before “on fleek” was a thing. And the whole time it’s been there, it’s been poisoning me, slowly making me sick, more and more each year, in strange and interesting ways.

Part of me grieves the time it’s stolen from me, the life I can never get back. I have to wonder who I’d have been without it, how my choices might have been different if I hadn’t been suffering with anonymous and debilitating disease. Over the last twelve years or so I’ve seen fellow Performance Academy alumni go on to work in Hollywood films, West End plays, and award winning TV shows. While I wouldn’t change anything now if I could, and I’m very happy, and count myself lucky even, writing video game narratives and script, my life might look very different today if I hadn’t lost the prerequisite stamina and discipline to perform. I’ve been limited. And there have been times over the last decade when I’ve been in a bad place mentally.

My brain tumor is the most likely cause of my declining health, and in the mere four months since I learned it was there, I’ve been grappling with the idea that my chronic illness may not actually be so chronic. I’d had to come to terms with the thought that I would always be sick, for the rest of my life, but now that may be untrue. I might actually get my life back. So, surgery and radiation, and the impending recovery periods, are scary. But the thing I’m most scared about is what’s on the other side of all that. I don’t really know who I’m going to be after this. I might still be fragile, and continue making adjustments to cope with day-to-day life. Or, I might be a new version of myself entirely, one unconstrained by a decaying flesh vessel. And while that is an exiting thought, it also brings about a strange and intriguing kind of terror. Perhaps this is a more widely applicable life lesson. I have no idea what comes next.