We Bought a Zoo. Benjamin Mee

high doses of steroids would reduce the inflammation around the tumour so that it could be taken out more easily.

      Watching her being wheeled around the corridors, sitting up in her backless gown, looking around with quiet confused dignity, was probably the worst time. The logistics were over, we were in the right place, the children were being taken care of, and now we had to wait for three days and adjust to this new reality. I spent most of that time at the hospital with Katherine, or on the phone in the lobby dropping the bombshell on friends and family. The phone-calls all took a similar shape; breezy disbelief, followed by shock and often tears. After three days I was an old hand, and guided people through their stages as I broke the news.

      Finally Friday arrived, and Katherine was prepared for theatre. I was allowed to accompany her to a waiting area outside the theatre. Typically French, it was beautiful with sunlight streaming into a modern atrium planted with trees whose red and brown leaves picked up the light and shone like stained glass. There was not much we could say to each other, and I kissed her goodbye not really knowing whether I would see her again, or if I did, how badly she might be affected by the operation.

      At the last minute I asked the surgeon if I could watch the operation. As a former health writer I had been in operating theatres before, and I just wanted to understand exactly what was happening to her. Far from being perplexed, the surgeon was delighted. One of the best neurosurgeons in France, I am reasonably convinced that he had high-functioning Asperger’s Syndrome. For the first and last time in our conversations, he looked me in the eye and smiled, as if to say, ‘So you like tumours too?’, and excitedly introduced me to his team. The anaesthetist was much less impressed with the idea and looked visibly alarmed, so I immediately backed out, as I didn’t want anyone involved underperforming for any reason. The surgeon’s shoulders slumped, and he resumed his unsmiling efficiency.

      In fact the operation was a complete success, and when I found Katherine in the high-dependency unit a few hours later she was conscious and smiling. But the surgeon told me immediately afterwards that he hadn’t liked the look of the tissue he’d removed. ‘It will come back,’ he warned. By then I was so relieved that she’d simply survived the operation that I let this information sit at the back of my head while I dealt with the aftermath of family, chemotherapy and radiotherapy for Katherine. Katherine received visitors, including the children, on the immaculate lawns studded with palm and pine trees outside her ward building. At first in a wheelchair, but then perched on the grass in dappled sunshine, her head bandages wrapped in a muted silk scarf, looking as beautiful and relaxed as ever, like the hostess of a rolling picnic. Our good friends Phil and Karen were holidaying in Bergerac, a seven-hour drive to the north, but they made the trip down to see us and it was very emotional to see our children playing with theirs as if nothing was happening in these otherwise idyllic surroundings.

      After a few numbing days on the internet the inevitability of the tumour’s return was clear. The British and the American Medical Associations, and every global cancer research organization, and indeed every other organization I contacted, had the same message for someone with a diagnosis of a Grade 4 Glioblastoma: ‘I’m so sorry.’

      I trawled my health contacts for good news about Katherine’s condition which hadn’t yet made the literature, but there wasn’t any. Median survival – the most statistically frequent survival time – is nine to ten months from diagnosis. The average is slightly different, but 50 per cent survive one year. 3 per cent of people diagnosed with Grade 4 tumours are alive after three years. It wasn’t looking good. This was heavy information, particularly as Katherine was bouncing back so well from her craniotomy to remove the tumour (given a rare 100 per cent excision rating), and the excellent French medical system was fast forwarding her onto its state-of-the-art radio therapy and chemotherapy programmes. The people who survived the longest with this condition are young healthy women with active minds – Katherine to a tee. And, despite the doom and gloom, there were several promising avenues of research, which could possibly come online within the timeframe of the next recurrence.

      When Katherine came out of hospital, it was to a Tardislike, empty house in an incredibly supportive village. Her parents and brothers and sister were there, and on her first day back there was a knock at the window. It was Pascal, our neighbour, who unceremoniously passed through the window a dining-room table and six chairs, followed by a casserole dish with a hot meal in it. We tried to get back to normal, setting up an office in the dusty attic, working out the treatment regimes Katherine would have to follow, and working on the book of my DIY columns which Katherine was determined to continue designing. Meanwhile, a hundred yards up the road were our barns, an open-ended dream renovation project which could easily occupy us for the next decade, if we chose. All we lacked was the small detail of the money to restore them, but frankly at that time I was more concerned with giving Katherine the best possible quality of life, to make use of what the medical profession assured me was likely to be a short time. I tried not to believe it, and we lived month by month between MRI scans and blood tests, our confidence growing gingerly with each negative result.

      Katherine was happiest working, and knowing the children were happy. With her brisk efficiency she set up her own office and began designing and pasting up layouts, colour samples and illustrations around her office, one floor down from mine. She also ran our French affairs, took the children to school, and kept in touch with the stream of well-wishers who contacted us and occasionally came to stay. I carried on with my columns and researching my animal book, which was often painfully slow over a rickety dial-up internet connection held together with gaffer tape, and subject to the vagaries of France Telecom’s ‘service’, which, with the largest corporate debt in Europe, makes British Telecom seem user friendly and efficient.

      The children loved the barns, and we resolved to inhabit them in whatever way possible as soon as we could, so set about investing the last of our savings in building a small wooden chalet – still bigger than our former London flat – in the back of the capacious hanger. This was way beyond my meagre knowledge of DIY, and difficult for the amiable lunch-addicted French locals to understand, so we called for special help in the form of Karsan, an Anglo-Indian builder friend from London. Karsan is a jack of all trades and master of them all as well. As soon as he arrived he began pacing out the ground and demanded to be taken to the timber yard. Working solidly for 30 days straight, Karsan erected a viable two-bedroom dwelling complete with running water, a proper bathroom with a flushing toilet, and mains electricity, while I got in his way.

      With some building-site experience, and four years as a writer on DIY, I was sure Karsan would be impressed with my wide knowledge, work ethic and broad selection of tools. But he wasn’t. ‘All your tools are unused,’ he observed. ‘Well, lightly used,’ I countered. ‘If someone came to work for me with these tools I would send them away,’ he said. ‘I am working all alone. Is there anyone in the village who can help me?’ he complained. ‘Er, I’m helping you Karsan,’ I said, and I was there every day lifting wood, cutting things to order, and doing my best to learn from this multi-skilled whirlwind master builder. Admittedly, I sometimes had to take a few hours in the day to keep the plates in the air with my writing work – national newspapers are extremely unsympathetic to delays in sending copy, and excuses like ‘I had to borrow a cement mixer from Monsieur Roget and translate for Karsan at the builder’s merchants’ just don’t cut it, I found. ‘I’m all alone,’ Karsan continued to lament, and so just before the month was out I finally managed to persuade a local French builder to help, who, three-hour lunch breaks and other commitments permitting, did work hard in the final fortnight. Our glamorous friend Georgia, one of the circle of English mums we tapped into after we arrived, also helped a lot, and much impressed Karsan with her genuine knowledge of plumbing, high heels and low-cut tops. They became best buddies, and Karsan began talking of setting up locally, ‘where you can drive like in India’, with Georgia doing his admin and translation. Somehow this idea was vetoed by Karsan’s wife.

      When the wooden house was finished, the locals could not believe it. One even said ‘Sacré bleu.’ Some had been working for years on their own houses on patches of land around the village, which the new generation was expanding into. Rarely were any actually finished, however, apart from holiday homes commissioned by the Dutch, German and English expats, who often used outside labour or micromanaged