This is another in our series of articles highlighting prostrate cancer awareness month. Here, former Rye News editor Charles Harkness shares with us his own life changing experience. Ed.
When you read this it will be March 24, or later, and the month will end shortly. But life goes on with the odd hiccup – like prostate cancer which is getting a lot of attention this month and other hiccups like Covid and (oh yes) old age.
I often calm myself by looking at art scattered around my home (but not including Monet’s Bridge shown above – a bit expensive!) as I have been fighting various illnesses, including two cancers, over the last three years – and fearing I might die.
However when I was born my mother and grandmother were told that I would probably die and prepared a death notice for the local paper. I was premature, I was born with damaged lungs (asthma), and we were in the middle of a war.
But I’m now 80 and I’m still here, but my lungs are still poor, which is partially why I ended up in the Conquest’s accident and emergency last September.
Tackling cancer
Earlier last year though I had major surgery, also at the Conquest, for bowel cancer (and you don’t want to see my stomach). I am still being treated for prostate cancer, and I am on the books of five Conquest departments.
So fighting cancer is not easy, but testing and catching it early helps and research keeps on finding new ways of tackling it.
Back in the 80s though I worked in a smallish office, about 50 total staff I recall, and shortly after I left, three wives of men I knew well (the men of course) died of breast cancer in one year. Since then I have met women who have survived it, and testing and treatment is vital, as it is with all cancers.
And Covid still lurks
And diseases do not go away. We just find better defences. But a virus like Covid is still lurking and will keep coming back. Plagues do. Trust me. I am a historian, at least I read history for part 1 of my degree. The black death in Medieval times, Pepys’ plague (under a Stuart king) and Spanish flu (first world war) all kept coming back for some years, and Covid is still out there.
At the start of March over 129,000 beds in English hospitals were occupied by patients with Covid and around 6,500 staff were off with Covid-related symptoms. In the seven days up to March 16, 656 people were admitted to English hospitals with Covid symptoms, and 188 were in intensive care in ventilation wards.
That last figure concerns me because one of my children, now ancient, is a stroke consultant and stroke victims often need intensive care so she has been competing with Covid victims for her patients – and frequently exposed to Covid too.
So death still lurks, and the older you get, the nearer it lurks. However Great Ormond Street were wrong in my case in 1943, and a Bart’s specialist who said, in my presence, that I would die in my teens, I was about 12 then, was also wrong.
Testing and check-ups vital
But I still believe regular check-ups and tests and getting treatment, which can so tedious, are vital for a long life. I have prolonged mine I think by doing a lot of walking – much in the Lake District, and once in the 50s clutching a Bren gun up Ska Fell (Hungary had been invaded by guess who).
Rowing was great fun too in an “eight” (think boat race) but I sank Cambridge’s Blue Boat and ended up in a Henley rowing club tipping soup over Princess Margaret’s back. But that’s a story for another day. I’m 80, and I’m going to be neither quiet nor sensible. I think my sex appeal peaked a long time back though.
In the meantime be aware of the cancers that are around:
- get tested regularly
- and put up with the treatment.
Image Credits: The Water-Lily Pond by Claude Monet, National Gallery,London/Art UK Creative Commons https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/, Maya Peters Kostman for the Innovative Genomics Institute https://innovativegenomics.org/free-covid-19-illustrations/ Creative Commons https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/.