Throughout the long ordeal, Tom and Hannah chronicled proceedings via pictures and videos, many of which were uploaded to our family’s WhatsApp group.
Showing quite extraordinary resilience, he also completed long and gruelling courses of chemotherapy and a state-of-the-art form of radiotherapy, called proton beam therapy.Ĭancer is a stubborn adversary, and over the ensuing eight months, Barney would undergo two more major brain operations, each of them similarly traumatic. Yet cancer is a stubborn adversary, and over the ensuing eight months, Barney would undergo two more major brain operations, each of them similarly traumatic. This awful spectacle is what greeted Tom and his wife Hannah all day, every day, for almost a week as they sat at Barney’s bedside waiting for him to come round from a 12-hour operation that aimed to remove a malignant tumour the size of an orange from the base of his brain. Then aged just 13 months, the poor boy - my nephew - is lying motionless in bed, his head wrapped in bandages and an array of medical devices attached to his face and chest. Taken on April 10, 2020, it shows Tom’s son Barney in the paediatric intensive care unit at St George’s Hospital in Tooting, South London. But the most striking photo is the one that explains why Tom had set out on this extraordinary journey in the first place. The Strava post contains several pictures of Tom in various states of fatigue. Instead, he set off from Wembury, a village just outside Plymouth, at exactly 8am on Saturday, and headed north, without stopping, for 37 hours, covering 117 very hilly miles in the process. A few days ago, my brother Tom uploaded a ‘morning run’ to Strava, the popular fitness-tracking app that allows exercise junkies to share their exploits.