I have signed up to run my first half-marathon in nearly thirty years; here’s why.
In January 2017 my father was diagnosed with stage IV kidney and bladder cancer; in March the same year my wife was diagnosed with stage I clear cell cervical cancer; two months later in May 2017 I was diagnosed with stage IV MSI-High bowel cancer with multiple metastases in the peritoneal cavity. At this stage the prognosis was that there is a 50% probability that people diagnosed with stage IV bowel cancer with two lines of chemotherapy available do not survive beyond three years, and surgery was not an option.
We made a decision early on that we would answer any questions our four-and-a-half-year-old son had as honestly as we could, and would tell him what was going on rather than hide it from him. This was obviously a difficult decision, not least for him, but with the prognosis being what it was you can’t lie to a child and say everything’s going to be alright, because at some point soon you are likely to have to badly disappoint them. Unsurprisingly he found it difficult to cope emotionally with what was going on around him, and we turned to St Oswald’s child bereavement service and their therapist Beth who helped him talk about his worries and find strategies for dealing with what life was dealing him.
My wife underwent surgery and radiotherapy in June 2017. My wife’s tumour was successfully removed, though she has regular monitoring to check that the remission continues. At the same time my father and I started chemotherapy; during chemotherapy I continued cycling to work when I could and for the first time in many years starting to run again because exercise is beneficial in the mitigation of treatment side-effects.
Courses of Folfiri then Folfox proved to have no effect on my tumours so in December 2017 we were back in the oncologist’s office facing the revised prognosis that with two lines of chemotherapy gone the 50% survival rate was now less than a year. The standard treatment as this point was limited to a third line chemotherapy with a limited efficacy as the cancer had shown no interest in reacting to the previous similar treatments.
The oncologist did suggest that there was an experimental Phase II immunotherapy trial that had recently been widened in scope to include the specific type of cancer I have, made available through the Sir Bobby Robson Unit that might be effective, so perhaps unsurprisingly I signed up for that.
By December 2018 I’d been on the trial for nearly a year and the growth of the tumours was largely stationary; it was at this point that for some reason I decided it would be a good idea to enter the ballot for the Great North Run despite the fact I might not make it to the start line and the last time I did something like this I was a teenager. Still, I thought, I probably won’t get selected in the ballot, so it’s fine.
That I have written this will tell you all you need to know about that piece of wishful thinking – in September 2019, two and a half years after diagnosis, and after 18+ months of immunotherapy my tumours and I will be running my first half marathon since the age of 17; I am running for both St Oswald’s and the Bobby Robson unit; St Oswald’s for the care and support they gave our son, and the Bobby Robson Unit so that others in the North East might benefit from cancer research as I have.
