THE BAND PLAYS ON

ANDY’S CANCER WAS BACK. It was early 2012, he’d been cancer-free since surgery in 2004 but now they’d found an eight-centimetre tumour in his chest. So it was back to Sydney’s North Shore Hospital, this time for chemotherapy.

Around the same time, I was becoming deaf in my right ear. I went to my GP, who referred me to an ENT specialist. “You don’t fit the profile, Cam, non-smoker, too young, too healthy. But we’ll get an MRI, rule out anything sinister.” The MRI result came back. An acoustic neuroma grows around your facial nerve right behind your ear, hence the name. The specialist and I looked at the