Choose Grey. Change Lives.

We wear grey - the internationally recognised colour for brain tumours - to give visibility to this invisible illness and show our support to the brain tumour community.

There are over 60,000 people in the UK living with a brain tumour. 30 more get diagnosed every day. From the most lethal brain tumour, a glioblastoma, to the long-term complications that come with a meningioma, every diagnosis changes someone’s life, and the lives of their loved ones. You can find out more by visiting : Our impact - Brainstrust, brain tumour charity. 

This cause is one very close to our colleague, Charlotte Maynard’s heart and she has decided to share her personal story with us.

In August 2020, my mum started to get severe headaches and fatigue that doctors believed to be caused by stress and lack of vitamin D. A couple of months later, she was home alone on the phone with her sister and suddenly she stopped making sense. She couldn’t form sentences or get out what she wanted to say. She went to the hospital, and they believed it to be caused by a TIA (colloquially known as a ‘mini stroke’). A month later, more tests showed she had a tumour around where her language centre was. It was supposedly quite aggressive as it hadn’t shown in an MRI from just 4 months prior and was now the size of a walnut.

 Thanks to the support of her company, they were able to fast-track her surgery and she was thankfully back home for Christmas, though due to her now being extremely vulnerable to Covid complications, we couldn’t see her through this whole time. It was confirmed to most likely be malignant and so she began her first bout of radiotherapy and Chemo in February 2021 and has just had her final dose, hoping all goes well!

 
She found Brainstrust a month into Chemo and was able to virtually meet quite a few people in a similar situation. Being able to share her experiences and listen to others allowed her to feel a bit less isolated, motivating and confiding in each other whilst going through some horrid side effects of treatment. She has been incredible, having gone back to work part time again 3 months into treatment (in a bid to not be driven mad by her sister) and we are hoping for good news from her latest MRI!

 
Sadly, this is something that is not guaranteed to go away after the initial tumour is treated. Due to the nature of a Brain Tumour, they can’t be extra cautious and remove the surrounding tissue as they can with other organs, so some cancerous cells must remain. This is why they do the treatment after- this is an attempt to kill off the remaining cells. However, this isn’t a guarantee so there is always a chance it could come back. For my mum, this could mean losing the ability to verbally communicate (which she was determined to not let happen) or use the left side of her body.

Brain tumours (albeit rare in the grand scheme of things) are a surprisingly common type of cancer compared to how much they are talked about and knowing the first warning signs means that it can be caught as early as possible and have the least amount of impact in your day-to-day life – the less chance it gets to grow, the less it interacts with your brain.

I hope you can all join me in raising some awareness for this invisible illness and encourage each other to be kind and look out for yourselves and your loved ones!

 
-    Charlotte Maynard