'I have lived with a brain tumour for five years'

Five years ago, Suzanne Davies was diagnosed with a grade 4 tumour in her brain and told she had just 12 months to live.

The 41-year-old mother-of-two said the news "felt like being hit by a bus" but she was determined to remain positive and fight to see her children grow up.

Suzanne, from Newtonhill in Aberdeenshire, told BBC Scotland's Mornings with Kaye Adams the first sign there might be a problem was when she started forgetting words and sending texts that made "absolutely no sense at all".

She was also experiencing terrible headaches and waking up in the night not being able to breathe .

A CT scan revealed a mass in the left side of her brain the size of a golf ball, that had probably been growing for a year.

Her children were aged four and seven at the time and Suzanne says she was determined to be strong for them.

She even told her own father to stop crying as they waited in the hospital for her neurosurgery operation to remove the tumour.

"I said 'I'm not crying so don't you'," she said. "I was quite brutal."

Suzanne says she thought the surgery went well and most of the tumour was removed.

"I thought the problem was gone," she said. "I could speak fine and send text messages but because there is still part of it there and it is the highest grade, it will never go."

After the surgery, her consultant told her the prognosis was not good.

"He said 'you've got a year to live. If you have chemo, you've got eight weeks more," Suzanne said.

"It was hard to accept that. It was the one time I could not speak. It was hard."

That was in 2014 and, despite the consultant's prognosis, Suzanne has managed to defy the odds.

The treatments have caused Suzanne serious problems, such as the start of an early menopause, low immunity levels and an underactive thyroid, which makes it difficult to control her weight.

"Does it matter? Nine days out of 10 I don't care. I think 'I'm still here'. One day out of 10 I go 'my jeans don't fit'," she jokes.

Suzanne also has serious problems with fatigue, which mean she has to plan her day very carefully.

She says she has short-term memory problems so keeps all her appointments on her phone and tries to arrange anything she needs to do for early in the day.

"When the kids come home from school at three thirty or four I am resting on the sofa. I need to," she says.

Every six months Suzanne has to undergo an MRI scan to see whether the mass has grown and is concerned each time that her tumour will not be stable.

Suzanne told the Kaye Adams programme that she was very lucky to have had support from family and friends.

Her husband Owen has been "fantastic", she says.

"I'm not saying this is easy," she told the programme. "It's been hellish, to be honest with you, over the years."

But Suzanne says she believes in staying positive and looking at what she has achieved each day.

"I have had a lot of ups and downs," she says. "Overall I remember sitting thinking at the start, 'I can either sit in the corner and cry about it or get up and get on with it', and that's what I have done."