It’s been five years and three major operations since David, 36, was hit with the news he was living with a brain tumour – a tumour he’s convinced was caused by excessive mobile phone use.

“It’s one of those things that you can’t really prove but I believe my tumour was caused by using mobile phones,” David, of Maitland, said.

“There’s always myths going around that mobile phones cause brain tumours and I believe it to be true. I worked for a mobile phone company for a number of years and I was a fairly heavy mobile user for a while and the side the tumour was on was the side I used the phone on . . . I used to find that I’d be on the phone so much that my ear would actually heat up.”

David said his type of tumour – known as an acoustic neuroma – has been linked to mobile phone use but nothing has been proven.

“The type of tumour I had is extremely rare, like one in 200,000 or something, and it’s this particular tumour that’s linked with mobile phone use. But there’s nothing to actually say that mobile phones cause brain tumours,” he said.

“The closest I’ve come to anything is a medical institute in Sweden that is doing research into the relationship between the old style mobile phones, the analogue system, and this particular type of tumour . . . maybe there is something there.”

David, a Maitland Repertory Society actor and director, first realised something was wrong with his brain when the right side of his body started to shake.

“I went to the doctor and was sent for an x-ray. Then I got a phone call a couple of hours later saying I had a tumour in my head,” he said.

A tumour that had grown five centimetres in diameter.

“I underwent surgery pretty much straight away and in total I’ve had three lots of surgery to remove the tumour and to be honest it was all quite difficult. I remember sitting in hospital thinking ‘oh god I feel so awful’ then I’d look around the ward and there were people worse off than I was. It was quite an interesting experience,” David said.