Surviving Brain Cancer in a Precarious World

Part 18: The Summer of Self Harm…

When I got passed the first month of the 3 between MRI’s I was blessed with a glorious summer in the Maelor hamlet of Tallarn Green. Because I was still trying to regain some fitness I would spend my lunch breaks going for walks around the countryside between the English border and North Wales.

The weather was glorious, so glorious it was easy to switch off and forget all the fear I had been through and all the stress spewing from the news about the nearing EU membership referendum which drove me insane with all the inaccurate news coverage and sickly jingoistic debates online which at this point I avoided like the plague to keep my stress levels down.

My vitamin D levels were rising and my blood tests were coming back brilliant when the district nurse would come to visit to check how I was recovering.
Having her support from the little village of Malpas was another one of the many things that made my love for the NHS grow even stronger.

The district nurse Laura wasn’t just any nurse, she genuinely cared and was a brilliant advocate for public health. She would always have a junior nurse with her that she could teach her brilliant craft and quality care to.
She was 1 of many brilliant public health advocates from Malpas. Our families favorite GP Dr. Davis was also an inspirational general health practitioner. She would always take the time to greet people in person in the surgery waiting room with a welcoming smile.

She was my all-time favorite GP because she wasn’t just well liked by everyone in the area but incredibly intelligent. Of all the times I struggled with the known symptoms that were likely related to a brain tumour, she was the best doctor I had during the 10 years my symptoms first appeared.

It would have been impossible for her to have diagnosed a brain tumour given that my symptoms were creating numerous false leads that were either ENT discomfort or complicated mental health problems such as inconsistent anxiety. She did, however, provide me with the best treatment for what little diagnostic data we had available during those years.

Because I moved around a lot at University and work during my 20’s I had to register with several surgeries but none were anywhere near as brilliant as Malpas, thanks to the amazing staff there like Dr. Davis and her district nurses.
So the NHS had become a huge love of mine. This was why, when it came down to the day of the referendum I knew my only option was to vote remain. I resented the process of having to take part in the referendum though because I was acutely aware that it hadn’t been put to the public for the right reasons, nor had it been conducted or formatted correctly.

The way I saw it was that as a 3D artist who can’t do anything else because I am not qualified, how could I and everyone else be qualified to make laws for each other when no one has even elected me to make laws for them.
It felt like the whole thing was rushed and given that our country’s biggest newspaper is run by a tax avoiding shyster who had no qualms about using the words of the right-wing terrorist who murdered the MP Joe Cox that summer, just because she was campaigning for remaining in the EU.

I felt it was sick of Paul Dacre’s Daily Mail to print front pages calling Judges “Enemies of the People” and naming remain campaigners “traitors” which was the same kind of toxic language that had been used by Britain First to radicalized the terrorist, that decided it was ok to murder this young female politician leaving behind a husband and kids.

That hurt me not just because it was a year I was fighting for my life and there was some psychopath treating other people’s lives like life has no value. It also hurt me because it had been encouraged by the people with the biggest platforms in the UK’s media.

Of course it was impossible to avoid the debates and the news just before the vote and not only did it convince me that no one in the public was qualified to vote on something as huge as this, but those that had swallowed up all the propaganda were just far too unrealistic and idealistic in their expected outcomes trying to justify the Leave campaign.

The night before the vote, the general view was that remain had it in the bag because it was the established status quo. I was no-where near as confident, I had seen that the vilest millionaires on the right, had hoodwinked the working classes who outnumber all the other demographics.

The right-wing establishment had played the “false Robin Hood” trick where it seems like rich elites have those on lower incomes best interests at heart when really it’s quite the opposite. I could think of no character more like this than Jacob Rees Mogg who I would genuinely compare to Hitler given his charismatic skills to appear like a savior to people who feel disenfranchised despite having a background a million miles off working-class life experience.

I went to bed that night thinking my vote for remain would be one of very few and that Leave would get a landslide because so many people read the daily mail and it had been directing people to ignore the ills of UK governments and blame everything on people they don’t know as well in Brussels.

Because before my diagnosis I was a misguided “Tim, nice but dim-tory boy” I was well aware of how vast and entrenched Euroscepticism is on the back benches of the Tory party. Although I was too young to know it at the time when I saw them lose power in the 90’s because of it. I liked pro-Euro moderates like Kenneth Clarke, not creepy right-wing Eurosceptics like John Redwood.

When I had supported David Cameron in my 20’s with the hope he would be more like Clarke than Redwood, and wouldn’t give in to the shysters in the press egging on his millionaire right-wing backbenchers to pressure him to hold a referendum. I failed to realize he was quite a gambler with politics and that soon he would gamble away too much and do it with utter complacency given his history of unforced errors when dealing with events both as PM and as a “dear boy”.

I was too unconfident and would bite my tongue too often when it came to dealing with elitists in the party that had no interest in social justice and just wanted to get rich easy and then be rewarded for it with over the top tax breaks that would rob from the poor of the services they rely on.

The damage was done and I was far too late to stop the far right shysters by the time the coalition government was in full swing. By 2012 the country was being pushed to the right by increasing calls for a referendum because more and more of these right-wing millionaires were getting excited about the prospect of avoiding taxes and ending the worker’s rights that EU membership provided.

It was also on my radar that Farage and Hannan were MEP’s creaming off the taxpayers everywhere with the generous MEP perks but both had pathetic voting and debate attendance records.

They were purely there to be the most insulting in the main chamber to get some “YouTubery” and provide an illusion to the UK public that they were fighting for them while actually deliberately weakening our influence in the EU to make it seem like the UK never has its way despite having more concessions than any other member such as avoiding the single currency or Schengen to name a few.

So when the results came that we would be leaving the European Union, I was only surprised that we hadn’t lost by a landslide. The Millionaires had won because they had hidden their real interests from the working class communities and sold them a pack of lies on everything from the money we would save to getting them to blame immigrants for everything under the Sun.

By this point, the likes of the BNP had disappeared from politics, but it doesn’t mean their followers had. They had consumed the right and it was no surprise to me that a few days after the referendum result that David Cameron threw in the towel and was to be replaced by all those that hated moderates.

When Theresa May became Prime Minister I felt terrible because I knew that she had been a hopeless home secretary that had done nothing to control immigration which gave the Brexit fans ammo to blame it on the EU’s policy of Freedom of Movement.

Aside from all the knuckle-dragging racists that had moved over to UKIP since the collapse of the BNP, The normal people that voted for Brexit seemed most against this policy of Freedom of Movement on the grounds that they felt it make Europeans take advantage of our NHS via “health tourism”.

I only read up on the details of this policy after she became PM and I discovered that far be it from allowing “health tourism” if an immigrant has not come with health insurance, the home office can send that individual home within 3 months if they still haven’t got insurance.

It also covered work in that if an immigrant came to the UK without a job and failed the secure one, again the home office can have them deported if they have failed to get a job in that 3 months after arrival.
So all the things I was being told by these angry people were wrong and they had just discovered the famous “red bus” was a lie about saving £350 million that could be used on the beloved NHS instead.

Very few people expressed regret though, instead, people doubled down regardless of how many of the original arguments to leave were being debunked. Weeks after the result the atmosphere online was still toxic with families being split and friends breaking up because it was the most important and inevitably divisive vote in a generation.
For me, it was all about the NHS. I had already lost faith in the Conservatives for their disregard for junior doctors, removing the bursary from student nurses and the lies regarding their funding and privatization.

I felt I couldn’t just stay silent while I knew the very organization that had helped save my life, free at the point of use, was about to face ruin by either losing too many highly skilled European nurses and doctors or being entirely sold off in a vulture American trade deal while the UK is forced to accept international trade deals to justify the tariffs on EU trade.

I became angry when Brexit fans would ignore all these issues and simply cop out with “We won, get over it” or “its democracy remoaner” because these made it seem like it was just a competition to them like they had picked a side and grown unchallengeable pride in it.

It didn’t feel anything like democracy because I never voted for anyone who voted on my future on this matter. I voted parliament to govern, not the endless variables of educational standards and diverse careers within the general public.
I had no pride in trying to seek efforts to reverse the outcome because it’s not about winning and losing when your priorities are your own survival and to protect your friends and families future.

My Fiancée and I tried to make light of the result at first by toying with the idea of moving to Canada. But I hated the idea of leaving the company I work for and we both knew we wanted to have kids in the future that could grow up with their grandparents close by.

Brexit continued to unravel weeks after the result and the more it did, the worse it seemed for our future prospects. We hated the idea of children having fewer protections from food standards to worker’s rights or simply not being able to enjoy things like we got to enjoy like cheap flights to explore other local countries but most importantly, know that they have an NHS free at the point of use.