Yesterday I was lying in a hospital ward, woozily coming round from a general anaesthetic, when two doctors drew the curtain around my bed. One announced, "Mr Kelly, I'd like to show my colleague your testicle. It has swollen to an abnormal size and needs to be treated fairly urgently."

I looked back at him with an expression of, I suppose, confused horror. He glanced down at his clipboard. "Oh, I'm sorry, wrong Mr Kelly. I do apologise." Both  medics then walked over to the other side of the room and attended to my namesake's no doubt considerable discomfort.

Not only is my groin area in fair health. Thanks to this trip to the infirmary I can now do something I haven't been able to for a couple of months: shut both eyes. You'll remember I told you I was getting a gold weight put into the upper lid on my faulty peeper to help it close. Well, I did, and now it does. This makes me very happy indeed.

Since shortly after my tumour was removed, as you know, my right eye has been permanently open. While waiting for the facial nerve which normally helps it close to recover from bruising, it's been constantly irritable. My day was taken up squeezing in various ointments before sicking it shut with surgical tape and covering it with a patch. Now no more. All morning I've been fluttering my eyelashes like Marilyn Monroe on a speed-date.

The 1.6g lump of gold in the lid helps it close with the aid of a mysterious force known by physicists as "gravity". Instead of each blink covering only a fraction of the eyeball, the entire surface of the cornea is now protected. At night I can now get to sleep without the aid of vast quantities of Micropore. My day is no longer dominated by guarding it against irritation, although I do have to keep on applying two lotions called Viscotears and Lacri-Lube (both of which sound to me like Soho nightclubs).

Right now, I look like I've had a fairly severe kicking. My eye is bruised, blackened and half-shut. The upper lid bears the traces of what apprears to be a nasty cut where the weight was inserted. And the cheekbone below is reddened and grazed. All of this should be temporary, but in conjuntion with the crutch I walk with and my still-visible scar it makes me look like a bit of a, well, headcase. My mate Tim suggested that, whenever anyone asks where I got my injuries, I should reply: "Fighting," or, even better: "At the football". Putting that sort of story about could do wonders for my reputation here in Dumfries.

Hopefully my face will recover soon and the weight will come out. I hope so, as I'm planning to top up my invalidity benefit by taking it down the pawn shop. In the meantime, my right eyelid will droop a bit lower than its counterpart on the left side. It's noticeable, but not as disfiguring as wearing an eyepatch. Or, indeed, having one abnormally-swollen testicle.

I've always quite fancied being a pensioner. It sounds like a great life: you don't have to go to work, or worry about what you look like, or pay to get on the bus. One long round of getting up whenever I want and holding up queues in shops by counting out my change in 2ps onto the till; brilliant. If today I were to, say, wet myself in the street, everyone would think I'd been drinking too much. An over-60 could just claim his colostomy bag was knackered and onlookers would take pity. All right, so the money's crap and all your joints seize up. So what? That's price I'd gladly pay for not having to cram onto a crowded tube every morning.

I was a bit worried I wouldn't get to enjoy my dotage properly, now our boss class wants us to retire at 68. Given that the average male life expectancy up the road in Glasgow is just 69.1, I feared I was only going to get 13 leisurely months as a senior citizen. Thanks to my tumour, however, I've had an early taste of lifestyle a la oldie.

To all intents and purposes, my day is that of an elderly gentleman. I get up when I want and listen to Radio 4. I take loads of baths. If I run into anyone I know when I hobble into town with my crutch, we talk about "my operations". Everyone holds doors open for me. I've lost track of "young people's fashions" (although to be fair, this was true before my operation). My favourite pudding is tinned peaches with Carnation milk. Need I go on?

From 9am to 5pm every weekday, my contemporaries are pensioners. If I go for a cup of tea in a cafe, everyone's old. If I wander through the park, everyone's old. Of course, there's the odd young mum, usually about my age, with a toddler or two. But as the offsping speed past me and my stick, I feel very elderly indeed. Mr Trotsky said: "Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that happen to a man." It certainly was for me when it arrived at 26.

What I share most of all with OAPs is a greater degree of social licence. It was even better when I wore the eyepatch and was more obviously incapacitated. If I get in someone's way in the street, they don't complain. If I step on somebody's foot, or talk too loudly, or ask a shop assistant a stupid question, I am indulged. I might try robbing a bank to see if the manager takes pity and lets me off.

I don't reckon I could stick this out forever, of course. It all gets a bit boring when I've read the papers, done the crossword and am waiting for Countdown to start. There's always the sense as I walk through down a deserted high street at 10:30am that everything is going on without me. Even in Dumfries. Plus, I still have to pay to use the bus.

Apologies if I've ruined anyone's breakfast. Readers of the super soaraway Guardian this morning were confronted with three bloody great pictures of me to put them off their cornflakes. No doubt the paper is currently fending off a barrage of complaints unseen since Operation Clark County.

Anyway, the photos accompany an edited version of this blog in the G2 section - you can read the extract here.

Hello to anyone who's come across this site for the first time from the piece. Feel free to make yourselves at home and have a look round. One way of repaying my hospitality might be to email letters@guardian.co.uk with the message: "Dear sir, browsing Mr Kelly's article today I could not help but notice you have uncovered a writing talent unmatched by anyone in history up to, and perhaps including, Shakespeare. Please commission him again forthwith."

Anyone who wants to get in touch about acoustic neuromas, or anything else for that matter (it's not like I've got much to do all day), can reach me via headcase_blog at yahoo.co.uk.

My Murdoch-like attempt to take over the world's news media continues apace with a feature in today's Daily Record, the biggest selling newspaper up here in Scotland. Basically it's the same as the Guardian article, but converted into the tabloid idiom - shorter paragraphs and more about how great the staff at the Southern General are. Media studies students can compare it here.

I did promise you I was going to frighten some small children with my strange appearance. Yesterday, in true panto villain style, I finally managed it [evil cackle].

My eye turned a bit red last week so I've been taping it up again until it gets better. On my way to the football I dropped into a pub to change the dressing in the toilet. As I was in front of the mirror, about halfway through the job, a bloke came in to use the urinals and left his son (about four or five years old, replica shirt, bobble hat) standing behind me. I felt him tugging the back of my trousers.

"Whit ye daein'?"

"I'm making my eye better."

"Whit's wrang wi' it?"

"It's no' well."

"Kin ah see it?"

I spun round, ripped off the tape, and started blinking furiously. "Eek!", shrieked the wee boy. He ran over to his dad, who was laughing so much he splashed all over his shoes.

Witness my latest fashion accessory. I've just been to see an opthamologist who reckons taping my eye shut is doing the skin around it all sorts of damage. So, to keep it safe at night, he's given me a big box of contraptions like this.

It's called, with brilliant simplicity, an eye bubble. It's self-adhesive and keep moisture inside so that the cornea doesn't dry out. You can't tell from the photo, but the plastic bit starts off clear - that's condensation clouding it up.

Thankfully it's only applied when I go to bed and comes off first thing in the morning, so I don't have to wander the streets wearing it. However, next time I'm invited to a fancy dress party I'll stick one on each eye and go as Jeff Goldblum in David Cronenberg's 1986 horror classic.

Apologies for this blog being a bit quiet for the best part of a week. I've been away: visiting my old London stamping ground. It's a bit of a landmark, really, given that I haven't travelled anywhere like as far since after the operation. Bit pathetic that it's such a big event for a man of 26 to go all the way to the big city, and on my own too! But them's the breaks.

Visiting somewhere with which you are familiar after an absence of a few months has a great humbling effect. It's the most vivid demonstration of how the world is quite content to carry on spinning without you. I stepped off the tube at Willesden Green, the deeply unfashionable (and thus ideal for me) corner of Brent which was my home for two years, and noticed the subtle differences: the old Irish boozer opposite the station given a fresh lick of paint, a wall I used to walk past every day re-plastered. When I got to my flat it had been redecorated. Part of me was a bit disgruntled that the entire metropolis hadn't crumpled into fire and anarchy as a result of my absence, so it's just as well I was reminded of my importance in the scheme of things.

That said, I'm not sure London would have been able to recognise me again at first glance. On the surface, anyway, I looked fairly different: short hair, big scar, knackered eye, frozen side of face. If I did seem a stranger to it, the city didn't treat me any differently. It never does. I could have sat on the Circle Line all day with the words "SUICIDE BOMBER" tattooed on my forehead and no-one would have looked at me askew. But that's London reserve for you. The only way you can get anyone to take any notice of there these days is to swim up the Thames. And be a whale.

Why did I make my pilgrimage all that distance south? Certainly not out of fondness for the place. Not for London as a geographic entity, less still for all it represents, do I have much affection. Dirty, cold, expensive, violent, atomised, with crime and inequality rampant, it offers a lower standard of living than most places I've stayed in. No, it's appeal is functional: one, because it offered the opportunity to further my career, and two (most importantly), because most of my friends live there.

And that was why I braved the rail network to go back. Sitting in a pub on Thursday night, surrounded by familiar faces, I was able to forget about being a Brain Tumour Victim and feel my old self again. And perhaps that's where the ultimate triumph over illness and adversity is to be found: not in TV movie-like epiphanies or moist-eyed, raised-fist salutes against a burning sunset, but sitting in a Camden boozer with people I like talking about choc ices.

And that's why, for all that I moan about the place, I vowed to return for good when I stepped back onto the train at Euston. I won't pretend that by the time I do so I'll have changed any less than the road from the tube to my flat. But underneath I'll be the same, more or less. I've had a better time of it than the whale, after all.