The power of positive thought... and a blue slide

Dave’s father Derek and grandfather Eric Willan died from cancer.

It is while he is at the American Hospital in Dubai for surgery on his small intestine that Dave encounters fear for the first time.

Unable to eat or drink, he is being fed via a tube in his nose. He decides to take a stroll:

“I am walking down a corridor and I look out of a random window and I see a blue slide. It looks like a water park.

“I go on my walk and do my lap and I come back to the same point and look out of the window. The blue slide’s not there. The water park’s not there. I think, ‘I just hallucinated seeing a water park.’

“My father died of cancer. My grandfather also died of cancer. One thing I remember during their deaths is they both hallucinated.

“I have got this tube up my nose that is driving me insane. I’m hallucinating. I know I’ve had cancer removed and for the first time in all of this I feel scared.

“Before this, it wasn’t really real. It [cancer] happens to other people. But when you have it yourself, you don’t really know what to do, so you pretend it’s not there and everything will be okay. When it manifests itself in a way you’ve seen before, and that went badly, then you get frightened. About a day and a half goes past. I keep walking down this corridor. It starts to drive me insane. The tube up my nose is driving me crazy. Dr Salti [Dave’s surgeon] says, ‘You can’t remove it unless you eat or drink and there’s no sign of your body allowing you to do it.’

“I said, ‘I’ve got to take the risk.’ He said, ‘All right, fine. I’ll pull it out now.’ He pulled the tube out.

“I took a big breath and within an hour my body was suddenly working again properly again. I went for a walk again down the corridor. There’s the big blue slide. I thought, ‘This is odd. What’s going on?’”

Dave realises what has happened.

On the day he was admitted, he looked through an open door and saw the slide through a window. The door had subsequently been closed.

When Dave returned to what he thought was the same spot, he had been looking through a different open door – and the slide was not visible from this vantage point. The blue slide had been there all along – he just couldn’t see it.

Dave says: “During those four days, I had gone through this frightened, scared ‘can’t eat, can’t drink, losing weight’ hell. And then somebody had opened that door. I could see the slide again and I realised it was real. It was a water park in a hotel. But the only way you could see it was through this particular door.

“I rang my wife and she came an hour later. I took her down there, to the door, which was closed this time. I opened it and said, ‘Look. There’s the blue slide. I’m not going mad.’

“Within 24 hours, I was out of hospital. Within three days, I was at work. That’s the difference between positive and negative thoughts.

"When you think things are bad, you can’t do anything. When you are positive, you can do anything you want. The recovery was remarkable.”