RFL Life Confession By Maisy Dollinger

Relay for Life Confession

By Maisy Dollinger

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Hope in Research

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I remember very clearly the day my parents called me to tell me the news that my dad had prostate cancer, it was a word I knew well and had lost a friend to cancer a few years previous.

But I am an optimistic person, I was straight onto some friends I know who are in medicine and learnt a lot through my own reserach. Initially we heard a lot of positivity..."Prostate cancer is a common cancer and there is a high chance of recovery"....."he can be treated and still die of plain old age"....."we caught it early, there are lots of options". All of this put my family and I at ease and we went about our business waiting for results of further tests.

Soon those results came and the messages changed slightly, but still gave hope. "His cancer is inoperable" along with "it is an agressive form of prostate cancer"....what did this mean? Aren't all cancers agressive by their very nature? My mum just looked at me for answers and I could see fear in her and I will never forget the look she had that day. The Dr's all talked of treatments and therapies and we as a family took it all in, researched, asked questions, cried and supported each other.

This led my dad to what seemed to be a never ending cycle of treatments and hospital visits...about 18 months in all, hormones, steroids, anti depressants, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, more hormones and it went on, this was how life was. We knew he was never going to be cured, but this seemed to be containing it all. He lived through this daily, the biggest health scare you can have...daily. He stayed strong, enjoyed meeting friends, going for drinks with my boy, taking family out to eat and embraced it all.

Every month he would have his PSA levels checked and this was a measure of how the cancer was doing, was it spreading? etc. it stayed stable, small fluctuations from month to month but nothing to alarm us......until....

One month it lept up, and I mean lept up a lot. The numbers of this antigen in his blood indicated it had spread. Magnetic resonance imaging, bone scans, ecg's all followed, more blood tests.

The scans came back and it had spread to his bones, predominantly in his spine, and the blood tests revealed his PSA was spiking. I knew this was not good and so did my mother, my dad stopped asking questions and just looked at the Dr, with tears running down his cheeks, and said that he did not want to die. This was really hard to sit through with them, but I am glad I can be there for my parents. You have to know this is a man, retired from 25plus years service in the army and to see him beg for life was heartbreaking, he was scared and worried...what could we say? You get to a point where you can no longer say "it's ok, we'll get some medicine and it will all be ok", because it wasn't going to be ok.

A month later he was told he has 12 months to live, that was April 2010. I remember being at work knowing he had his check up, and I had a feeling it was not going to be good, he looked ill the last time I had seen him, and I had pre-warned my boss I may need the afternoon off. Around midday the call came and the news was broken, I was devastated, I cried at my desk and I left work. He left mum with her friend and I met him in a pub. We just drank and talked, the conversation did not dwell on his news, but on life and hope. He just kept saying that he was not going to die and he would be ok, it was tough as he looked for confirmation of this statement, but what do you say?

Still to this day he does not talk about it being terminal, he never has said the words. But he knows, he has moments where he will talk to me....I remember Christmas Day, he did well, but in the afternoon he got tired and went to bed, I remember lying next to him on the bed and he looked grey in colour, swollen from the steroids, sunken tired eyes. He started to cry and said he can't go on much more, he said he was scared. It broke my heart and I layed there and cried with him, hugging him. This is a young man in my eyes and a man who has grandchildren who want to play with him, climb on his back, listen to his stories....he is an amazingly funny man, he is talented, and can sing like Elvis, and that is no exaggeration....he thought he had no hope....but he goes on.

Earlier this year, we were told his last chemotherapy did nothing and it was still spreading, now in his lymph, shadows on his kidney, further up his spine and a PSA level which was astronomical.

In the UK the Royal Marsden Hospital in Surrey is an amazing centre for cancer research, they only treat cancer....and it is famous for it's research and trials. I knew my dad had no other options to him, and we needed to find him a trial, I work in a medical arena and went through the lists of every single drugs trial for Prostate cancer I could find....there are a lot. There are also lots of qualifying criteria, based on previous treatment, age, type of cancer...endless variations. Crossing more and more off my list it seemed impossible to find a match. But we managed to get referred.

I remember walking into that hospital, it was the first time I had been to a place purely dedicated to Cancer research and treatment. To say I was moved is an understatement. People of all ages, from all walks of life, sharing this illness, a commonality, but warmth, happiness and hope was there too. We were seen and my father was accepted onto a drugs trial. This is a drug with no name as yet and there is what they call a double blind study, so he had a one in three chance of being on a placebo and even his Dr would not be able to tell, hence called double blind (the computer decides). This hospital will be looking after him. Now, these are the experts, the best there is at this, the top specialist in this form of cancer is reviewing his documents, there has to be hope, right?

There is hope, and we have it as a family. His twelve months is up in a few weeks, and he is doing ok. Dont get me wrong, he is still terminally poorly with secondary cancers, but it has not grown since he started the trials, his PSA level has even dropped......He is NOT on the placebo. He is more positive, yes we still cry, he still has a lot of pain relief injections in the middle of the night, he goes to the hospice from time to time.....but there IS hope of a longer life. Hope in research, hope in people, hope in kindness and empathy of all those who know him and my family. But most of all this is a disease which touches us all, there is no escape from it, but there is always hope.