Richard Scolyer

The team came around in the morning and the professor went through the scan with me and told me what the diagnosis was and I couldn't get Katie on the phone and I rang the kids and told them what had happened and that it seems I've got a nasty type of brain cancer.

Well, Emily was at university and Matthew was in Year 12 and Lucy Year 10.

Yeah, so, you know, that wasn't a smart way to break the news to them.

Katie actually arrived at the hospital.

soon afterwards and got on the phone to her sister who lives close to us and Sally kindly went round and started to help support the kids and Emily left uni and came straight up to be with the family and support each other.

But yeah, how I broke the news wasn't the smartest thing to do, that's for sure.

Well, we tried to use the travel insurance thing, but it was going on for a few days.

And in the end, Brenda Sherlingram, the neurosurgeon who was kind of looking after me, she'd said, just come home.

There's not a big risk.

So we just bought tickets and flew back.

Didn't tell anyone.

until we got on the plane, what the story was, because I actually had trouble before when I had that injury, when I stacked my bike, minor things.

Anyway, there was two tickets available, two last tickets available on the only flight that we could get back to Sydney.

And one of them was business and one of them was economy.

And Kate very kindly let me go in the business class seat.

Well, anyway, I was very kind of her and she'd come up every four hours and give me some medications that I needed to take.

And, you know, we got back all fine, no dramas.

Well, there's many different sorts of brain tumours that you can get.

The one that I've got, this thing called glioblastoma, and there's different subtypes of it.

You can't tell what subtype it is straight off a scan, but it looked like it was a high-grade glioblastoma.