There are lots of ‘bistros’ near our home in London and my favourite, which is tiny, has been run by the same couple for years. It is here that I pop in to have a coffee, to buy some of their home-made goodies or even just to chat. It is also here, in the smallest of back rooms, that I have worked on many of my blogs!

In the school holidays, their children have always come in to ‘help’. It was more often their daughter – Anya – than their son, and, over the years it is Anya whom I got to know, early on chatting about school and most recently about university. Anya, now a 23 year-old university graduate, still occasionally comes in to run the ‘front-of-house’. 

From an early age – from six years old anyway, Anya was rather special, not so much because she was happy entertaining herself for hours drawing or reading in the corner of the bistro, but rather because she had such a knowing and responsive face.

Earlier this year when I was having a coffee, her parents drew me aside – they wanted to tell me something in confidence and of great importance. Anya was about to have an operation to remove a brain tumour – it was a slow-growing cancer first discovered when she was a child and of which I knew nothing. 

Everything had been decided and all they were waiting for now was a date. The family had been told that operation would take most of a working day and afterwards it would be months before she would again be walking, writing and talking and generally being her normal self. Moreover, they all knew that procedure was complicated and carried a very high risk which meant that if things went wrong Anya’s life could be severely limited. 

Six months have now passed since an operation in which everything went well – all traces of the tumour were removed and she has fully recovered. For all of us, the frightening alternatives could now be forgotten. This blog retells the conversation I had with the ‘new’ Anya a few days ago in which she told me about her cancer and how it made her feel. 

Her first symptoms – the occasional seizure – developed when she was three and at eight she had an operation at Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital (see first illustration) where the surgeons managed to remove a cancer with the longest of names – a dysembryoplastic neuroepithelial tumour or DNET. This tumour, which is very rare, mainly affects children and is ‘benign’, so it does not spread to other parts of the body. However, if left to its own devices it gradually gets bigger and bigger and soon interferes with the workings of parts of the brain nearby. Although by convention it is ‘benign’, due to the way it grows and insinuates itself in time it can be very troublesome !

After that first operation, she was well and met all her developmental milestones. Importantly, although her school knew of her illness there was no ‘fussing’, an approach also adopted by her parents. 

At the time of that first operation she was warned that one day more might need to be done; and so it was. Years later her fits returned and at 14 she had a second operation at the same hospital. This time there were complications and it took months for her to recover fully during which time school was missed. Everything then slowly returned to normal barring one difficulty – it took longer for her to solve problems so allowances were made for her at exams.

In her early twenties her seizures once again retuned and the brain scans confirmed that the tumour had regrown; her operation earlier this year was designed to rid her of every last cancer cell once and for all. With new technologies this should be possible and indeed the surgeons said after the operation that this was achieved. The operation, now in a hospital for adults, in fact took eleven hours and for much of that time Anya was awake and answering all sorts of questions – by the precision of her answers they could tell where they could snip!

The operation results were greeted by family and friends first with enormous relief and later with celebration. For Anya it meant the world. It was extraordinary to hear her tell me that, as she grew up, her tumour did not stop her doing anything, but privately it was always ‘there’ and made her unable to see herself as an adult. Following this most successful of operations all that has changed – womanhood, and a healthy woman at that, is now a reality, and with this has come a new life, a new freedom and new potential. What a battle; what an outcome; what a story; what a person!

The illustration shows the name above the front door of the children’s hospital in London where Anya had her first two operations. 

For helping me write this blog, I would like to thank Anya, Anya’s parents, Rohan and Vivien.

• Anya is not her real name – she asked that she should remain anonymous. For some reason, the name Anya, which has its origins in Russia with meanings that include grace, strength and power, immediately came to my mind and to this she agreed.