Sam Suriakumar was a healthy, active father of two, living in London with his wife and daughters. In early 2020, something strange started happening: he kept smelling bleach around the house. At first, he thought his wife had just cleaned the bathroom, but the smell wouldn’t go away, and he started feeling worse by the day.

What seemed like a harmless symptom turned out to be a red flag. Just days later, Suriakumar had a seizure on the subway. He was rushed to the hospital, where doctors discovered a glioma, a type of brain tumor. Here’s how it unfolded, and what came next in his journey.

The strange symptoms before the diagnosis

In the days leading up to his diagnosis, Sam said he was feeling unwell and started noticing a strong, strange smell. “It was a smell like ammonia or bleach, and it felt like a cleaning agent was filling up my mouth”, he explained. At first, he assumed his wife Sindhu had been cleaning, but the sensation returned—once while lifting weights at the gym, and again at work, when he felt too unwell to look at a screen.

He left the office early that day and boarded the London Underground. Minutes into the ride, he lost consciousness. He had experienced a full tonic-clonic seizure. “My seizure was so severe that I fell off my seat, and the contractions were so violent that I dislocated my shoulder”, Sam said.

A fellow passenger pulled the emergency lever, and staff at Balham station called an ambulance. Sam had another seizure in transit. At the hospital, doctors began running tests, including brain scans and a lumbar puncture. While initial scans were unclear, further imaging revealed a mass in his brain. That’s when Sam learned he had a glioma.

What happened after the diagnosis

The news was overwhelming. “When they told me, I was devastated. I didn’t even understand those words”, Sam said. Suddenly, the man who had been working full-time and training at the gym couldn’t drive, work, or fully process what was happening.

The tumor, doctors told him, was growing like a cobweb, difficult to remove without damaging areas responsible for speech, movement, and memory. A surgery could only remove about 40% of it. When the COVID-19 lockdown began shortly after, Sam focused on spending time with Sindhu and their daughters, Avaana and Arya.

Over the next few years, his condition remained stable. But in July 2023, while attending a wedding in Brazil, new symptoms appeared. Scans revealed the tumor had grown. Back in the U.K., he underwent another biopsy, followed by radiotherapy and a year of chemotherapy. It was a grueling process—Sam lost over 40 pounds and described being “really sick during chemotherapy”.

Despite it all, he pushed forward. In April 2025, he completed a fitness competition in Belgium. In July, he celebrated his 40th birthday, a milestone he never expected to reach. “When I was first diagnosed, I didn’t even think I’d see the end of the week”, he said. “Forty was always a big benchmark number because of the poor survival statistics for people with brain tumors”.

Now, he gets regular scans every six months. His most recent was stable. Sam’s story is a reminder that symptoms that seem minor can be early signs of something serious. His journey continues, but reaching 40 has been, in his words, “a massive dream”.