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One word to sum up the neurosurgeon appointment: inconclusive.

That's not a brilliant word to come home with, but it could be a lot worse.

It turns out that the tumour is in the cavernous sinus.  This is a little space in your skull that's behind the eye and nose, and in front of/below the brain.  It's a space full of Very Important Things - among other things, the inner carotid artery (which takes blood to the brain), the optic nerve, the oculomotor nerve and the olfactory nerve.  As such, this is an area in which it is impossible to operate, because it would be certain to do more harm than good.

However, the tumour has done a bit of bone remodelling as it has grown, and extended itself in to the nasal sinus.  This means that it is possible to go up there and grab a bit of it, so we can work out what it is, from which next steps are decided.

Next week they want me to have a CT scan, some blood tests (for the anaethetist to reference), and a biopsy (under general anaesthetic/one night hospital stay).

An MRI is good for looking at tissue, but not at bone.  CT is great for looking at bone.  The CT scan will tell us how calcified the tumour is.

If it's very calcified, that makes it in effect a sealed unit.  I've simply got a pebble in my head.  That will by definition be benign - it can't grow any more.  If it's totally calcified, there's not even any point taking a biopsy!  This would then be a case of an annual scan to make sure it stays that way.  Any symptoms - with my vision, with my headaches - just need to be managed (and as the neurosurgeon pointed out - there's actually nothing to say for definite that the recent monster headaches are even related to this; my migraine might just have gone intense because migraines often change with age, and the tumour is something we would otherwise never have known about).

If it's not completely calcified, then there will be a biopsy taken of the bit that's grown across in to my nose.  From this, it will be determined if the tumour is benign or not.

If it's benign, then we follow the same procedure as if it's completely calcified - check up on it every year.  If at any point it starts showing signs of waking up, we zap it with some radiation to shrink it back down again.

If it's not benign, then it'll be chemo and radio and all that sort of stuff.  This is a vague sentence because while I acknowledge the possibility, I'm not going to give up any of the apparently limited space in my head to think about it until there is no feasible alternative!

The neurosurgeon himself can only be described as extremely relaxed about this.  I'm only getting my biopsy next week because he happened to find an ENT surgeon available to do it next Friday; but he said under normal circumstances it might take a month to get a date that can be done (yes, even privately), and if that were the case, no problem, this can wait a month.  Indeed, we could re-scheduled next Friday if that weren't convenient, if we were going on holiday or something (we were going on holiday in late May; we've cancelled it all, possibly unecessarily as it now turns out, but I'll probably be happier being close to Addenbrookes until we know for definite what is going on).

So, inconclusive, but when that's presented to you by an undeniable expert who is completely relaxed about it, that's actually somewhat reassuring.  While I'm not exactly comfortable with the technically accurate words 'inoperable brain tumour' yet, I am after only a couple of hours beginning to see that they are not necessarily a Very Bad Thing.