Ruth Alderman

The word that changed my year arrived in a quiet audiology booth: a small benign tumour, an acoustic neuroma, sitting on the balance nerve behind my left ear. It was not an emergency and it was not going to be cut out. Instead my team talked about watching it for a while, then about a single dose of finely targeted radiation with a name I had never heard: Gamma Knife.

I am a details person, and the details were exactly what I could not find. Hospital pages promised a “non-invasive” procedure and stopped there. Forums swung between miracle and disaster. Nobody set out plainly what the frame on your head actually feels like, why the tumour does not vanish on the scan afterwards, or how long you wait to know it worked. So through my own treatment I kept notes on all of it, then checked them against the evidence and against people who do this for a living.

American Radiosurgery is those notes, tidied up and fact-checked. A consultant neurosurgeon signs off the clinical side before anything goes live. I write the part I know first-hand, the lived experience of going through it; he makes sure I have the medicine right.