Cancer patient goes under gamma knife

But the company director, of Horsforth, Leeds, walked out of hospital the same day and was back at work within a week after gamma knife radiation treatment.

Diagnosed with von Hippel-Lindau disease, which affects fewer than one in 36,000 people and causes multiple tumours in different parts of the body, he had previously had four operations in Hull to remove brain tumours. He needed a life-support machine and spent up to six months off work on a long road to recovery, which “almost killed me”, he said.

Mr Richards feared a similar experience after a scan detected a new growth but this time was treated at the Leeds Gamma Knife Centre at St James’s Hospital in an hour-long procedure using 192 beams of radiation to target the tumour. It was the first time the £3m gamma knife has been used by Leeds neurosurgeons on a patient with the disorder.

Within three days, he was back on his motorcycle trike and a few days later back in the boardroom of the computer software company he jointly runs in Staffordshire. “To have a brain tumour, and now be treated as a day patient, is a remarkable advance and offers new hope to people like me,” Mr Richards said. “I was allowed to go home an hour or so after the procedure finished with nothing stronger than some painkillers for a headache. I hope I am not diagnosed with a new tumour in the future but I know that my condition makes me particularly prone.

“But if I am, I will be far less fearful and much more positive.”

The centre, run by private firm Nova Healthcare in partnership with NHS chiefs, is one of only four in the UK.