WHEN Patricia Batram wakes up, the first thing she thinks about is her son Dean.

The last thing she does before she goes to sleep is to pray to God he won’t be taken from her.

Her work, as store manager of The Range in Colchester, is the easy bit of her life. It is normality and, as such, a liferaft in the turbulent sea of living with cancer.

Patricia lives one day at a time, as does Dean, with no promises and no guarantees, just hope.

Dean Wood, 29, a father-of-four and a regional petrol station manager, was diagnosed with two brain tumours in November.

Patricia, who lives in Highwoods, Colchester, said: “He was at my house for Sunday lunch and had a headache, a really terrible one at the front of his head.

“He went to the doctor, who said it was a migraine, but a couple of days later it was so bad he had to go to the hospital. He had MRI and CT scans.”

The family is close and they were all with him – Patricia, her eldest son, David, 35, her daughters Natasha, 32, Clare, 31, and Dean’s fiancee, Amy.

Patricia said: “They called us all into his room and we were told they had found two masses, two tumours in his brain and that they were cancerous.

“It was devastating. We all cried together.”

Within a week, Dean was sent to the specialist neurological centre at Queen’s Hospital, Romford, where he underwent the first operation.

Patricia said: “The operation lasted about four-and-a-half hours, but with the preparation and the recovery, he was away for about nine hours.

“I was there supporting Amy and she was supporting me. We just walked up and down and up and down, waiting for him.”

 

 

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Surgeons cut a flap in his skull and tried to remove as much of the tumour as they could.

Some days after the operation, however, Dean suffered a seizure and the tumour at the back of his brain began to bleed.

“We thought we were losing him,” said Patricia.

Two weeks after the first operation, Dean underwent a second op as surgeons tried to remove the second tumour. The size of a walnut, it was positioned close to the nerves in Dean’s brain which affected his speech, sight and movement.

Patricia said: “They could not remove it all because it was too dangerous and they had to be careful about damaging his brain.

“There are segments left and there is a possibility the tumours will grow back.”

Dean underwent chemotherapy at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridgeshire and radiotherapy at Essex County Hospital.

He lost his hair and steroids made him bloated, but still the tumours grew back.

Patricia said: “The tumours have grown back as big as they were and he has two more.

“He had a full body scan and it showed he has a nodule in the lung and some in the large intestine and the lymphnode. It is in his blood. It is the most aggressive form of cancer you can have.”

Surgeons have said they cannot risk operating again, so Dean has chemotherapy tablets to try to keep the cancer at bay.

Dean and Amy married at Gosfield Hall, in April, a month after Amy gave birth to their son, Oliver.

It was a family celebration and a memory Patricia cherishes.

Dean and Amy went to Florida on holiday at the beginning of the month and Patricia and the rest of the family joined them.

The family does not know what the future holds. After his diagnosis, Dean was given six months to live, but the chemotherapy tablets seem to be reducing the size of some of the tumours.

The family take each day at a time. Patricia said: “I keep saying ‘take me, don’t take him. He has a young family’.

“My son, David, says the same.

He says he doesn’t have children.”

Support for the family has been vital and Patricia hopes a cancer centre in Colchester could provide support to anyone in need.

She said: “It is so important to have support.

“I have my husband, Jason, and my daughters and son and daughter- in-law. I can cry or shout or just talk. I am surrounded by good people, including those I work with.

“When I went to Addenbrooke’s with Dean there were so many people there with cancer. You can’t grasp the number of people there are.

“A lot of them are on their own and they need support, they need to have somewhere to go to have a cup of tea and to talk about what they are going through.”

Patricia supports the creation of a new cancer centre in Colchester.

With colleagues she has completed two sponsored walks.

They have been hard but every step Patricia took, she thought of Dean, hoping and praying for a miracle.