The corridors and rooms were starting to fill with unfamiliar faces and patients the size of small whales being wheeled past on trolleys.

You might expect that seeing so much pain and suffering might help you keep your own difficulties in perspective but, alas, it does not.

In America there are far more patients, and therefore more patients with such tumours. The patients are less deferential and trusting than they are in Britain. They are more like consumers than petitioners, so they are more likely to make sure that they are treated by an experienced surgeon.

The idea that my sucker is moving through thought itself, through emotion and reason, that memories, dreams and reflections should consist of jelly, is simply too strange to understand.

We can make our own choices. We get to choose how we react to all that happens to us.

Hope is beyond price and the pharmaceutical companies, which are run by businessmen not altruists, price their products accordingly.

The only meaning of death is how I live my life now and what I will have to look back upon as I lie dying.

The eyes are said by poets to be the windows to the soul but they are also windows to the brain: examining the retina gives a good idea of the state of the brain as it is directly connected to it.

And now all those brain cells are dead – and my mother – who in a sense was the complex electrochemical interaction of all these millions of neurons – is no more. In neuroscience it is called ‘the binding problem’ – the extraordinary fact, which nobody can even begin to explain, that mere brute matter can give rise to consciousness and sensation. I had such a strong sensation, as she lay dying, that some deeper, ‘real’ person was still there behind the death mask.

My readiness to admit to my fallibility is perhaps rather English, but I hope that the problems I describe will be familiar to doctors and patients everywhere.