Tate woke up the morning after we arrived at the hospital. He was probably thinking ordinary things. About getting home again. What he might have for breakfast.
Just things that matter to five-year-olds.
And then, somehow, within what felt like the blink of an eye, his life had changed completely.
He wasn’t just a boy anymore. He was a patient. And he was going to be one for a very long time.
Not just that day.
Or even that week or month.
It was going to be months, and months, and months. In fact, I don’t think he ever really stopped being a patient from that day onwards.
The morning Tate went down for his first brain surgery was the last morning of the life we knew. His life computer had pressed the reset button.
It was Reset Day.
He was being prepared for his first of three eight-hour brain surgeries that week. And while he was asleep, with surgeons working inside his head, it felt as though someone had pressed the reset button on his life. Except nobody knew exactly what would happen when the system came back on and rebooted.
Would everything still work?
Would he wake up as the same Tate?
Would he remember who he was?
Would we?
There are moments in life when you can almost see the dividing line. It was like someone entered that ward as he was wheeled through the doorway and drew a very large red line across our lives.
A clear before and after.
Like we had all stepped through a porthole in life and found ourselves navigating another world without a map or compass to show us the direction. This was something I would normally have found exciting and fun. But this time, it was shrouded with fear and the unknown.
A path where you never quite knew what was laid out in front of you. Going barefoot through a field full of thistles.
For us, this was it.
Before the tumour.
Before the surgery.
Before cancer became a word that belonged to our family.
And then there was everything that came afterwards.
The strange thing about pressing reset is that you expect the computer to come back exactly as it was. You press the button. It shuts down. It starts again. And you expect everything to be where you left it.
But life didn’t work like that.
This reset button was more like a restore-to-previous-settings button. A point in Tate’s life where the last backup to the cloud had been completed. Some elements dropped off and weren’t saved properly and needed to be relearned. Others were still there, but needed time to rejuvenate and flourish again. And some things surprised us by returning when we least expected them to.
His body had been through something enormous. His brain had been through something we couldn’t comprehend. And we were suddenly learning a new version of our child while desperately missing parts of the version we had only known days before.
The little boy who had learnt to ride his bike and was about to embark on off-road rides with me.
The one who was playing rugby and flew down the wing as soon as he had the ball.
The one who was learning his 1–100 numbers.
All of those things suddenly felt like they belonged to another lifetime.
Everyone talks about survival. And of course, survival was everything. But nobody really prepared you for what came after.
The rehabilitation.
The uncertainty.
The scans.
The waiting.
The things he could do before that suddenly became difficult. The things you hadn’t even thought about because you’d never needed to.
We had already taught him to walk. He had to learn this again.
He knew how to eat and drink. We had to teach him these things again.
And who knew that it took more than 30 individual muscles to swallow some water? Thirty muscles to retrain. A few drops of ice-cold water on a teaspoon every day, for weeks until he could take sips from a cup, and then a straw again. But ice cold – had to be ice cold. It helped the muscles to interact and sense the water come into his mouth. It could distinguish between the water and saliva.
How we had to come up with ways to retrain his body and thinking. To reinvent new pathways for him to do things. The basic of things.
He knew how to talk. We didn’t hear his voice for three months after his surgeries. But when it finally came back, he found the magical words of:
“You stink.”
When told by Karen, he loved him.
His personality and humour never left his side throughout. And that was important. Because while so much had changed, there were still flashes of the Tate we knew.
The humour.
The cheekiness.
The things that made him laugh.
The things that made us laugh.
Sometimes those little moments felt bigger than any milestone. Because they reminded us that he was still there. Perhaps that was what we slowly began to understand about the reset. Tate hadn’t disappeared. His brain and body had been through something enormous, and some things needed to be found again.
Some needed to be relearned.
Some needed time.
And some things, thankfully, had never gone anywhere.
But teach him we did. One slow, steady step at a time. We helped his brain to relearn. To remember. And to reboot.
There were times when progress was almost impossible to see because we were living inside it every day. When you watched a child constantly, you didn’t always notice the small changes. One extra movement. A slightly stronger swallow. A longer period awake.
A sound.
A word.
A step.
But when you looked back, sometimes even only a few weeks, you realised how far he had travelled. The reset wasn’t a single moment. It wasn’t a button that had been pressed and then everything was simply restarted.
It was happening every day. Small parts of life restarting. New pathways being formed. Old skills returning. New ways of doing things being discovered.
And perhaps most of all, we learnt that when your child’s life had been reset, your life had been reset too.
Our plans changed. Our routines changed. The things we worried about changed. Our understanding of what mattered changed. We had stepped over that red line with Tate. There was no going back across it. There was only learning how to live on the other side.
I don’t know exactly what this story will become. I only know that there was a little boy called Tate who went to sleep for eight hours, three times over. And when he woke up each time, none of us knew exactly what the next chapter would look like. We didn’t know what would return. What would need to be relearned. What would take time. Or what new challenges would be waiting for us.
But slowly, steadily and sometimes frustratingly, the system began to reboot.
This is that story.
The story of the reset button.