Funny article in the Guardian:

[redsoxliberal]

How do you know you've got a brain tumour?

Steve McDonnell didn't - until he collapsed over lunch in a top French restaurant.

Tuesday November 23, 2004
The Guardian

The restaurant was called Mon Plaisir, but in the event, it wasn't very pleasant for me. It had been a particularly bad day. I was coproducing a TV current affairs series, and my colleague Andy and I had spent three or four hours with a QC at Middle Temple discussing how to get out of a nasty little libel.
Mon Plaisir looked just the ticket. The capital's oldest French restaurant, a sign said. Red checked tablecloths, sawdust on the floor, good-looking steak-frites at the next table. We ordered two glasses of kir, and Andy went to the gents. I looked round the other tables. Sheridan Morley was there, talking to some theatrical types. I remember picking up the menu and raising the glass to my lips.

Then my brother Jonathan turned up. A bizarre coincidence. But hang on, this wasn't the restaurant - I was on a hospital trolley. Andy wouldn't tell me for months what had happened. I eventually discovered that he came back from the gents to find me standing, making a speech to my new friends at the other tables. To this day, he tactfully claims he didn't hear what I was saying. He did tell me that I completed the address with some aplomb, then fell, in a single, graceful movement, to the floor.

Three hours later I woke up in University College hospital. My wife Philippa was there. She looked fraught. An alarmingly young doctor came into the cubicle. "Don't worry about a thing," he said. "Everyone's allowed one fit, and after you've got your strength back, you can go home. But to be utterly safe, I think we'll just take a blood sample." Back he came half an hour later to say I had too many white corpuscles and I ought to have a brain scan. "But there'll be nothing wrong - it's just insurance."

An hour or so later, he returned with an awkward look. "Well, there is a little something there," he said.

"What is it?" I didn't fully understand. I was still a little dazed.

"A fairly big golf ball, I'd say." Odd, I thought. Don't golf balls come in just one size? "Or possibly a satsuma."

Funny day. First I miss what would have been a superb lunch, then I'm told I have either a novelty golf ball or a yuletide citrus fruit in my head. I would have to see a consultant.

Looking at my scan, the great man pronounced that the lump had to be removed. While it might be benign, he said, it was actually in the brain not just pressing against it. "It's a perfectly straightforward operation," he told us. "The only problem is my diary." We watched heavy-hearted as he flicked through it. "Mmmm, would you be free on Friday morning?" Friday? This was obviously no satsuma.

"I should make clear," he added, "that this does not come without its risks. You could be half paralysed, unable to talk, or your coordination could go and you might remain an invalid for the rest of your life."

People with tumours were in every bed. Most were pensioners. I was 39. There was one person younger than me, who confided that he was SAS and had been caught in an explosion on a secret mission. "But that's hush-hush," he said. "Don't worry," I assured him. "I won't remember."

I was starved, drugged up, given a premed and wheeled in. The next thing I remember is opening my eyes and singing exquisitely to two nurses who were looking down on me.

The consultant came to the bedside. "It went very well," he said. "I got as much of it out as I could. The biopsy shows it was malignant, but quite low down on the scale." And I wasn't paralysed! A great day indeed.

I stayed in hospital for a week. The high point was a lecture that my consultant gave to nursing staff. I was trolleyed in as the main exhibit. "Most people with tumours know very soon there's something wrong with them," he said. "Headaches, drowsiness, or something out of the ordinary. But that wasn't the case with Mr McDonnell. Would you care to tell us when you first knew you had a problem?"

I told the assembly that I had made an impromptu speech at a French restaurant in London.

"French? It wasn't in Covent Garden, was it?" asked the consultant. Yes it was, I said.

"Could it have been Mon Plaisir?" I nodded. "How funny!" he said. "It's one of my very favourite restaurants in London. We usually go there for dinner on our anniversary." He was beaming.

Months later, I remember asking him to explain the dip in my forehead that seemed to be becoming more pronounced. Oh, everyone who's had the operation has one of those, he said happily. "When I go to a party and I see someone on the other side of the room with a little hole in the forehead, I say, 'Ah, that fellow's probably had a full frontal lobectomy oligodendrogliama." Some party talk.

Not everyone is so astute. At the elections in Washington this month, a fragrant Republican dowager, an enthusiastic admirer of brave men in uniform, said in some awe, "May I ask you a personal question? Is that a bullethole in your head?" She seemed disappointed by my answer.

My recovery was slow but sure. The only consequence of the tumour was failing memory. I was referred to a hospital shrink. He sat me down in his little office. "Today is Sunday," he said. "Is it?" (It was not. It was Thursday. He was trying to trick me.)

"Don't be silly, of course it's not," he said. "It's Thursday really, but let's just pretend it's Sunday." Golly. And I'd gone to see him.

"So if it's Sunday, what will be the day after tomorrow?"

And there began a 10-minute quiz. Could I remember whether, when in France, one drove on the left or right? Was London or Manchester the capital of Britain? He wrote down my answers in a notebook. "You're fine," he concluded. "Slight memory lapses are common after brain surgery, but as you get better, they diminish."

Three weeks later the phone rang at home. I was making Sunday lunch (it really was Sunday). It was him. "I have just been tidying my notes and I've realised there was one other matter I forgot to put to you," he said. "The Prince of Wales's wife - can you remind me of her name?"

A couple of months later I went back to Mon Plaisir. I was worried they would recognise me, but they didn't. In fact they were kindness itself. I sat at the same table, ordered a kir, then the steak-frites I'd noticed on my first visit, and left. It was very, very good, but I didn't tell them. This was not the time for a speech.
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Loved the line in Washington! :D:D:D