Well it all started off with a very pleasant weekend with my son down in York and I had experienced some chest pains and it was, I knew it wasn’t angina because I’ve had angina pains before and it was a strange pain and I decided foolishly just to soldier on.

Finished off our weekend and returned to the family home, contacted the family doctor and told him what was happening and he said he would phone me back in five minutes. He phoned me back in five minutes and said “I want you to get up to the hospital right now. If theres any problem with transport I’ll organise it but you must get, can you get up there right now?” I said “Yes my wife will take me up right now.” He said “Right they’re waiting for you.”

So I went up to the A & E and went through various tests there and transferred from the A & E into the ERU, that’s the Emergency Receiving Unit in the hospital. And they continued with the tests and was told it was, that I had prolonged angina attack and this was the line of their enquiries. And they kept me in the ERU from the Monday until the Friday and on the Friday afternoon a doctor came in and she told me she had good news for me and she says “[Name] you do not have a prolonged angina attack, what you have got is a tumour in your right lung and the tumour in our experience it’s of a cancerous nature.”

So I spent January of this year, 2002, preparing to give up smoking. I went to the Cessation Nurse, I went to my GP, I got, started to do a written programme of my intention to give up smoking and was due to start on Zyban which is a much maligned drug which helps you give up smoking. Personally I found it marvellous. So my date to give up was 1st February, on 4th February I went to my GP to get my new prescription for cholesterol tablets and he spotted the clubbing of my finger nails and he said “I’d like you to have a chest x-ray.” And I said to him “Theres nothing wrong with my chest,” and he said “Trust me I’ve been doing this for a while,” and he said “I’d like you to have a chest x-ray, no rush any time between now and lunch time,” that was his, exactly what he said.

And I was in the chest clinic at half 11 in the morning, I think it was a Thursday morning, I got a phone call on the Monday saying would I come back for a more thorough x-ray done on a bigger plate I think. And all of the time I was thinking, ‘Well of course theres bits of crusty old muck on my chest I’ve been smoking for 34 years. The last thing I thought it was lung cancer, it never crossed my mind. And when it did I dismissed it as not being likely. So then I was referred for a CT scan and by now the professionals must be fairly confident I have lung cancer and I’m still blissfully unaware of this thinking they’re all wrong.

Well cancer, when I first thought there was a problem it wasn’t cancer, cancer hadn’t entered my mind at all. I went to my local GP with a sore arm, I had a very sore arm from here right down to my fingers. But I thought I’d been playing on the computer too much, I thought I’d perhaps trapped a nerve in my neck because my fingers were going numb and then they were getting, all my arm was getting really, really painful and so much so when I went to see the GP the next time he sent me for urgent physio. And the physio lady, she was very nice, and she gave me exercises to do and I did the exercises and it made it worse. So I went back again, she gave me different exercises again they made it worse.

I developed, started losing my voice periodically, every now and again I lost my voice. And it would come back and then I’d lose it again and it would come back again and then I went to the GP, I thought I’d got a chest infection which I suffered quite a few chest infections and my GP used to give me antibiotics and cleared it up and that was it but I went to the GP and I said “I think I’ve got a chest infection because I keep losing my voice,” and oh yeah he agreed that it was a chest infection, gave me some antibiotics. And I came away, took the antibiotics but this voice thing kept persisting for about a month after, I think it was about a month.

And we was running some raffles at the hospital for the Roy Castle Foundation, they had a month of raffles and a fundraising month for the Roy Castle Foundation and I went to the hospital one day to run a raffle and when I got there my voice had gone completely. And the lung cancer support nurse saw me while I was there, she was instructing me on what to do with the raffle and she said “How long has your voice been like that?” And I explained to her and she sent me straight down for a chest x-ray there and then. And when it came back she called me into her room and said “It looks as if your cancer has come back again,” or “You’ve got a cancer back again.” She said “I’m referring you to the surgeon who did your operation.”

Yeah well I first noticed, first took ill in December 99 for the really severe chest infection. Went to my GP, had a course of antibiotics, which was like a seven day course, completed the course and the chest infection cleared, and then five days later it was all back again. Went back to my GP, who asked me if I’d finished the course and I said, Yes, of course. Gave me another course of antibiotics, completely finished that course, completely cleared up, five days later back again. So she sent me down the hospital for a chest x-ray.

I kept on going back to the doctor for treatment for this cough and I thought nothing about it but this cough was getting worse and worse and worse. I never really thought much about it because it was basically a cough and I wasn’t getting, bringing anything up with it, it was a very, very dry cough in fact. So in March of this year I was working offshore and one of the guys said to me, “You’re going to have to go and see the doctor, see the doctor about that again.” And I thought okay. Because being an offshore medic you tend to be one of the worst for going to your doctor’s, it’s one of those things. It’s like asking a doctor to go and see a doctor, it never happens.

So anyway eventually in May I was offshore and I woke up one morning, washed, shaved, cleaned my teeth, cleaning my teeth, spat in the sink as you do when you’re cleaning your teeth, blood. My gums don’t bleed, blood, strange mm. So swilled my mouth out, coughed again and sure enough again more blood. This went on for the fortnight I was offshore so on the Monday previous to me coming home I phoned up my GP and asked for an appointment and that was the 5th, 16th of May. As soon as I went in there and asked what was wrong, I said “I’m spitting up blood,” he said “Were going to have to get you an appointment for an x-ray.” The next day I went for my x-ray, the x-ray came back on the following Monday and I was told then that I had a shadow on my left lung.

OK, well for me it started in January 1989, the day after New Year’s Day. What happened, I’d had a heavy cold all over the holiday and I got up in the morning and the next thing I felt something come into me throat, me mouth and went to the sink and I spit out a load of blood. To me it wasn’t blood it was liver, you know it was that thick.

So, you know at that time we were undecided what to do, I thought it was, it was from me nose or something like that you know. And with it being the holiday period we thought I’d go to the pharmacist and get some advice or something.

And I don’t know what made me do it but I insisted that I go to hospital. And I went down to the local hospital. Anyway they done some tests on me then because I’d presented, I forget what they call it like coughing blood up, x-rayed and they couldn’t find anything and the blood had stopped coming. But they decided then that because of the way I presented they would ask me to come in the following Wednesday to do some tests. And it was quite a shock to me you know, I’d never been in hospital before.

It all started really, January last year, that’s 2002, and I’d begun to realise that I was becoming short of breath, and if I would walk, well I suppose initially, if I ran for the train, I always seemed to be running everywhere, it’s sort of an old habit. And I found that I was short of breath and the breath was becoming more and more difficult, until January, February time, when I realised that just walking, from one end of the office to the other, I could tell that my breath was less easy, and up till this point I’d just put it down to the ageing process. And I’d just thought, ‘Well I don’t need to do anything about it. I’ve never made a fuss about anything and it was just so easy just to write it off and assume it was natural.

When it got to noticing the difference just with a short walk, I thought, ‘Well this can’t be natural. This can’t just be the fact that I’m in my early sixties, this can’t be right. So that’s when I first went to the doctor. The doctor was absolutely amazed and said she, my local GP, she listened, put the stethoscope on me, and sort of listened to the lungs, and she obviously didn’t like what she heard. And she said, ‘Theres something going on there and I think we need to investigate this pretty quickly’, she said. ‘You should really shouldn’t have left it this long, and I said, ‘Well you don’t see me very often. I actually know her quite well, but, because of helping her out with computers rather than because I’m her patient;

She referred me straightaway to the local hospital. I went to the local hospital, was introduced to a specialist there, in the Chest Clinic, and he straightaway said, ‘Chest X-ray’, took me through to the Chest X-ray department. Now that was, by this time it was sort of end of February, last year, 2002. The X-rays came back the same day, and his immediate reaction was, ‘You shouldn’t be walking around like this’, because he realised that, well the X-ray showed, that the largest part of the left, the left part, left lung, was, shrouded in fluid, and I was actually running on one lung. And that’s why I was short of breath, all quite logical really.

Well it all started February, I had a terrible cold, well I thought it was a cold for about three weeks and I kept coming to work instead of having a week or two off so I could finish this job you know. So I kept going in and it seemed to get worse. And then we went away for Easter 2002 down to my wifes aunties in Folkestone and I got struck there with pleurisy and it was really painful, it doubled me up…

So I went on penicillin, a course of penicillin for a week and pain killing tablets and that seemed to get rid of it. So I went down my own doctors to notify him what had happened and he sent me for an x-ray locally and they said there was something wrong so they sent me down the hospital. And they took more x-rays and then they wanted me to have a scan. So I had a scan as well and they thought it might be to do with asbestos. And then I had to go for a lung biopsy which was one hundred percent it was mesothelioma.

But getting back to when I was first diagnosed with mesothelioma it wasn’t only just the pain in my chest I used to have a pain right up in my shoulder, it was like a dull ache for ages you know and they give you pain killers to help that which it does, you know it kills the pain a bit so it makes you feel better. Because when I was putting up with that, because I don’t like taking pills if I can help it, I’m not that sort of person, but at the end of the day I had to have something because it was like having a toothache in your shoulder all the time and you had to have something to stop it you know.

And I was diagnosed on 9th November 95 and that is when that consultant told me I just had four months to live.

How many months do you think you delayed with the cough not knowing whether to go to the doctor or not?

‘only about six months. But it was, the cough was no trouble to me at all. A few people commented “Have you started smoking, you’ve got a smoker’s cough,” but I, it was something that crept up on me and I really didn’t take it seriously because I was not the sort of person that’s paranoid about health, I just thought may be I’ve got a, I don’t know what I thought but it didn’t occur to me.