I was given a choice and I even went to the, the abdominal surgeon and he was the one that said “Well Professor [name] likes to give chemotherapy after this, would you be prepared to have it?”

And I said “Well prepared to have it, this is a big question do I want to have it or not?” And he, he didn’t really try to persuade me, I asked him what he would do (laughs) and that’s a hard one, that’s a hard one for any doctor.

And he did admit that he, he would and so I went on that and decided to do it. They couldn’t tell me 100% that it would be successful or it would even be a better scenario than not doing it. It was a case of, you know, it’s likely to be helpful.

A lot of people were, at that time saying that chemotherapy was not a necessary thing to do but he felt that it gave you a bigger, much bigger chance if you did have it, but then you had to go through all that problem of having it. So that was the only the only decision making thing, was it going to increase the chances of getting over this.

And the doctor that I saw thought, well, he couldn’t say whether it was and he was very fair and said “Well I can’t tell you that it’s going to give you any more years really but theres a chance that it might be better to have the chemotherapy. So that’s what I did.

It’s like when I go to talk to people about chemotherapy, this one person said she didn’t think that she would go for it and I said “Well, that’s , you know, your personal choice, whether you go for it or whether you don’t but the hospital is basically saying uh, give you a choice”.

And I said “Well what you do is you get a list, you get a sheet and you write out the, the bad things about chemo’ that you’re gonna have to travel to hospital 20 miles, you’re gonna have to go every so often, you’re gonna have somebody to bring you down, you’re not allowed to drive.”

You write all these things down, all against chemotherapy and then you write what’s for. And I said “Well, when I was doing it I just wrote for, the first I wrote was it’s gonna save my life,” and I didn’t have to write anything more, it’s as simple as that.

So you take your choice and you don’t, in my opinion you just don’t have a choice.

So then you went to see somebody about the chemotherapy?

Yeah so then discussions started about chemotherapy. There were two doctors involved, one who was a colorectal cancer specialist who was, who worked at a kind of adult hospital, and one was just a general oncologist who worked at the children’s hospital. But they thought it was important to involve them, them both in discussions which was very, very helpful for me. So various lines of chemotherapy regime that they wanted me to have, it was the Folfox regime, which is Oxaliplatin Fluorouracil and F5U no 5FU, it’s a long time since I’ve had them now so, so yeah but I had six months of that altogether cycle-wise, I had the one drug, Oxaliplatin that went in attached to a drip over about two hours, and then for the next forty eight hours I was hooked up to the other two drugs. So to begin with

So you were an in-patient?

Yeah to begin with I was an in-patient for those forty eight hours, so it, approximately it took three days out of every two weeks, and then that cycle repeated. In time they actually got this pump which actually held chemotherapy drug, and it meant I could have a forty eight hour drug at home. I just carried this pump around the house with me for example, which was very, very helpful.

“You’ve got to think about this,” he says “it can be eh 50 to 100 that it could come back elsewhere but you could go for chemo to be on the safe side but you’ll need to talk it over with your family.” He said “If you go for chemo it jumps and, he says, it’s 80% it won’t come back, but that is entirely up to you.”

Well I felt that my own doctor, the surgeon, everybody had, did their best for me. I was getting told that if I took chemo it could help me so there was no way I wasn’t going to take it after all of what they had done.

I mean what was the sense of that, saying no I’m not gonna take chemo and then sit in a big chair and say, maybe I should have took the chemo. No, I made that decision there and then.

I started into chemotherapy in the January. I’d seen the oncologist previously, I was a bit astray in my brain at the time, I was finding it hard to cope. My wife wanted me to continue.

The guy I was talking to explained the symptoms that might happen, that did happen. Nausea, mouth ulcers, diarrhoea, all these things. They’re in smaller doses. You don’t have them all day every day, you have them some of the day some days in my particular case.

I did contemplate not having the chemotherapy. I had to go back for a second visit because I couldn’t clearly make up my mind that did I want another six months out of work, did I want to drag this all out, I wanted it to end.

It was explained to me that the chemotherapy would give me a better chance of survival. Like everyone I wanted to survive but at the same time I didn’t know if I could have another six months of being pulled about, in my mind of course.

I came home from the oncologist and I looked at my wife and she was falling apart. She couldn’t cope much more. I had to say yes deliberately purely to see my wifes face brighten, not be so unhappy.

He said that almost certainly it was in, that the cancer cells were in my blood stream so I definitely needed chemotherapy. He said the fact that, oh it had actually spread as well from my large bowel into my small bowel, that was obviously the pain that I was getting across here, that it had spread and it had it affected the lymph nodes as well. He said that taking that all into account your chances of not having a recurrence were about 30% at the time.

Taking my age into consideration he said it was about 50’50 of having a recurrence and I hadn’t realised it was as serious as that.

He explained that I had two options. One was 5FU which would have, was one injection a week for 30 weeks or there was a new drug that they were trying out which was a much more aggressive one which I think wouldve only have been about eight weeks worth of treatment I think.

I know it was much more, had much more severe side effects but really I took his advice he said “You know you’ve got a young child,” she was only about nine weeks old at this point, nine, ten weeks old you know he said “You want some quality of life. So I think, I think if I was in your position that’s what, I would go for 5FU. There isn’t particularly any proof to say that this other drug has better results so you’re probably better off going with the one that’s been sort of tried and tested.” So that’s what I did.