Richard Scolyer

In fact, the guy who wrote my memoir, Gary Maddox, we both represented Australia in August in Townsville at some world championships with my two oldest kids.

And yeah, very fun and proud of that.

Well, the conference had finished, we'd climbed some mountains and then when I woke up, I woke up in the middle of the night just feeling a bit sick and had a headache and, yeah, just not feeling right.

I was cold in the periphery.

I felt like I was going to vomit.

I couldn't eat any food and I had a headache.

Katie and I, you know, wondered if I was at a viral illness that could cause similar symptoms.

And...

The person who was putting on the conference was a good friend of mine called Arthur Zemberwitz and his wife Margaret and they worked in Boston but had grown up in Poland so they'd taken us after the conference up into the mountains where this happened.

They went off for the day but Kate said, no, I'm staying with Rich and it was very kind of her but she must have been able to see that this is something, not just a normal illness and

Luckily for me, she did do that because I had what's called a grand mal seizure where you go to sleep and your body shakes and you are incontinent and then called an ambulance and they took me into hospital.

Well, first of all, where we're staying at was in a ski resort and they had a CAT scanner and they couldn't see any bleed within my brain, so that's a screening test, but they knew things weren't right.

So with Arthur and Margaret's assistance, sent me back to the place where we'd done the conference, which was about an hour and a half drive away, and went there and had an MRI scan, which showed what was cooking inside.

That I've got a mass growing in my head.

It's most likely a brain cancer.

I was in total shock.

Yeah, I was blown away.

I did some stupid things, to be honest.

Well, as I understand it, the professor of neurology who was looking after me, you know, it was midnight or something, she'd come in and talked with Katie and Arthur and Margaret and said, looks like he's got a brain tumour.

But I was very tired and they didn't tell me at that stage and said they'd come back in the morning after I'd had a sleep and...