There are moments in life when hope feels like a fragile thing. You almost become afraid to touch it in case it disappears.
This week, however, hope arrived not as an emotion but as evidence.
The scans revealed that my cancer has shrunk yet again. Not only are the tumours in my brain continuing to respond, but the tumour compressing my spinal cord has reduced further too.
After everything that has happened this year, hearing those words felt almost surreal. It was undoubtedly the best news of my week.
Only a few months ago I was lying in a hospital bed after becoming paralysed from the neck down. Conversations centred around palliative care. The future was measured in months rather than years. Every day felt uncertain. Every symptom carried a question mark.
This week’s scan quietly rewrote that conversation. Nothing has suddenly become easy. I remain a quadriplegic. I still require help with every aspect of daily life. But medicine has given me something priceless: time.
Time to rehabilitate.
Time to fight.
Time to dream again.
Rehabilitation is a strange place because progress rarely announces itself with fanfare. It often arrives disguised as something almost invisible. A finger moves a few millimetres further than it did yesterday. A sensation appears somewhere that has been numb for months. A muscle flickers once before falling silent again.
To somebody else, these moments might seem insignificant. To me, they are everything.
This week a few more fingers began to move. Sensation has continued spreading across my upper body. Every new feeling reminds me that my spinal cord is still trying to reconnect. Nobody can promise where that journey ends, but every tiny improvement is another reminder that the nervous system is still alive and still searching for pathways home.
The work behind those moments is relentless. My days are filled with three or four physiotherapy sessions. Some leave me physically exhausted and emotionally drained.
I often finish wondering how athletes cope with this intensity every single day before smiling to myself and remembering that I used to be one. Only now, the finish line looks very different.
This week I spent time on a robotic walking machine, allowing my legs to experience the rhythm of walking once again. Whether my brain can eventually reclaim that movement remains unknown, but giving the nervous system that repeated pattern feels like another investment in possibility.
I also reached a personal best on the tilt table, standing at 60 degrees. A few weeks ago that would have seemed impossible. My blood pressure remained stable, another small victory that probably means little to most people but represents another brick in rebuilding my independence.
Progress is rarely spectacular. It is wonderfully ordinary. One degree higher. One finger stronger. One sensation further. One more reason to believe tomorrow might look different.
Despite all of that, I have to admit I feel emotionally exhausted. Rehabilitation demands every ounce of physical energy, but it also asks questions of your mind. Every session requires belief without guarantees. Every exercise carries equal measures of hope and uncertainty. It is impossible not to wonder how much further recovery can go.
When those thoughts arrive, inspiration often comes from unexpected places.
This week I watched my friend Archie Goodburn speak so movingly on BBC News about brain tumour research. Here is a young man who has balanced elite sport with his own battle against brain tumours while standing up for thousands of others facing the same disease.
I cannot imagine the emotional rollercoaster he has experienced over recent weeks, swimming at the Commonwealth Games while continuing to advocate for better research and better treatments across the United Kingdom.
Watching Archie, I felt an overwhelming sense of pride.
Elite athletes often inspire us because of medals.
Archie inspires because of his courage.
He reminds us that our greatest achievements are sometimes measured not by what we win, but by how we use our voice when life becomes unimaginably difficult.
As I lay in my hospital bed, I found myself thinking that courage is contagious.
Watching somebody refuse to surrender makes it just a little easier to keep fighting yourself.
I also had another valuable conversation this week with Professor Steve Peters. We have spent many hours talking about mindset over the years, but this conversation felt different. For the first time in a long time, we weren’t speaking about surviving the next few months.
We were talking about the future. What might life look like in years rather than months?
That single shift in language says more than any scan result ever could.
I don’t know exactly what lies ahead. Recovery from a spinal cord injury is measured over months and years, not days.
There will undoubtedly be setbacks. There will be frustrations. There will be days when hope feels distant again.
But today, hope has something solid beneath it. Evidence. A shrinking tumour. Moving fingers. Returning sensation.
And, perhaps most importantly, the possibility that my future is beginning to stretch further into the distance once again.
For now, that is more than enough reason to keep fighting tomorrow.
