As friends will know I started writing a memoir in January 2018, having reached the final target I had set myself in 2013. To take my youngest daughter to secondary school ( Eloise would not let me walk with her; parents don’t walk with their children to secondary school), It was September 2017, four years and a month since been given the terminal diagnosis. The average life expectancy with my metastases was twenty two months and I had read no one had lived four years. I had become an outlier in medical science, my case was not typical or perhaps not typical because I stopped medical treatment and tried something different. Either way they memoir is my experience with the cancer that was first diagnosed on April Fools day 2011, that I got the all clear for in August 2012 and was then told in August 2012 had returned (presumably it never left but was not visible on scans). This is the first chapter of the book, my lowest point in the journey. The consultant had taken away all hope and according to the government, it is illegal for anyone else to offer cancer treatment, according to the medical establishment and their scientists  if the biomedical model cant help, no one can and they are just creating false hope. Its in my notes at the Royal Marsden that I took Cannabis oil as recommended by a Canadian guy Rick Simpson in 2014. Make no Mistake Simpson more than anyone is the Pioneer of the therapeutic benefits of cannabis oil. When I took it there was very little on the internet only his website. Now in 2024 everyone is an expert, especially medical doctors who spent most of their careers telling people to not consume cannabis as it was a gate way drug to Heroin and caused mental illness.

In August 2018 I was on Good Morning Britain talking about Children’s Health and whether they needed all these vaccines. Doctor Hillary Jones presented the medical view. Have written my Masters in dissertation on the DTaP vaccine in 2004, something they were unaware of and no doubt surprised at my level of knowledge on the subject; the shows presenter Kate Garraway sneered at me; “Why do you think you know more than the Doctor”. Not wishing to be confrontational on live TV, or quote my Masters standard of education, I recounted my cancer story, which usually blows people away and another way of saying doctors don’t know everything. She may not have have believed me, but she was clearly not impressed. I realised presenters are just mouthpieces asking questions, without the knowledge to understand the significance of the answer. If you go into a butchers shop, the butcher is probably aware that its good to eat fish and vegetables as well, but is he going to talk to the customer about it probably not.

I update this post almost Fourteen years after I was first diagnosed. When they said I was stage 2 and survival rates were 80%, after surgery they found it had spread to Lymph nodes (stage 30) which meant Survival was 50% then in August 2013 the day this post is about survival was 0%. Then in April 2016 I became a cancer survivor after radio and chemotherapy. Researchers could now tick the box for the first prediction and enter it as part of the science. However that ticked box tells you nothing about the real story, the fact I was an outlier and tried something different to change the predicted outcome in 2013. The terminal diagnosis, stopping chemotherapy and trying cannabis oil or the scan I had in 2018 that showed I was cancer free. I have had so much radio therapy and chemo and CT scans I am bound to get cancer again one day, no doubt the sceptics will be dancing on my grave the way they do on others who choose to try something different. I have waited to talk about my experience until I had gone way way beyond the medical predictions, we are all going to die one day. I would probably need to live to be 150 before the doctors at the Marsden would show any curiosity as to why I might be still alive.

“Cancer Drove me up the Wall”

IF

If you can keep your head when all about you;

 Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

 But make allowance for their doubting too.

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

 Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

 And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;

 If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster,

 And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

 Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

 And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make a heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

 And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

 To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

 Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

 Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

 If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

 With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

 And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

 by Rudyard Kipling 

Chapter 1

Beginning of the end or the end of the beginning!

The sound of rush hour traffic had finished and the last patient of the day was waiting when Julie, my receptionist, asked if she could go home early. I looked at the young woman sitting there, waiting for a chiropractic ‘doctor’ to see her, and thought that being alone with me in the clinic for thirty minutes might not be what she had planned for her day. I asked Julie to stay, as this woman looked young and might not have had the life experience to enjoy my childish sense of humour.

A Danish newspaper once described my successful coaching methods for the Hellerup Idraets Klub (HIK) women’s football team, as a combination of Irish charm, flirting and shouting. Those who know me today would confirm that little has changed since: I am going on to seventy and still feel and behave like a teenager.  

You are expected to be ‘professional’ as a health care practitioner and not scare your patients away. Wearing a suit and tie and being rather dull is the easy option, but I prefer to introduce an element of humour to my work. Some people may not like this approach, which is fine; after all, you can’t please everyone all the time.

After the initial pleasantries, we sat down so I could take the patient’s medical history. ‘Are you taking any medications?’ I asked. ‘Antidepressants’, she casually replied. I barely concealed an eye roll as I jumped to an ill-informed conclusion as to why this 21-year-old was on antidepressants. A row with the boyfriend, perhaps? Or did Daddy not buy her the latest iPhone?

‘What have you got to be depressed about?’ I arrogantly asked my patient. ‘What I would give to be 20 again with my whole life ahead of me. In 2011, I was diagnosed with cancer and treated with radiotherapy, surgery, and chemo. I thought I would die many times, but never considered medicating away the mental anguish I was experiencing.’

Her eyes welled up: ‘My little brother died of a brain tumour last month and his twin brother is being treated for the same cancer. The radiotherapy has caused brain damage.’

It was as if I had been hit by a train and bits of me were scattered all over the track; where could I start to repair the damage? Not for the first time, had I spoken without engaging my brain. I was standing in a massive hole with no way out except to apologise for my appalling assumptions. I thought of the day at the Royal Marsden when they asked me to allow a child to go before me while waiting for my radiotherapy. At that moment, I realised having cancer is not the worst thing that could have happened to me; one of my children having it would be unimaginably worse. 

I treated my patient. She may never know how grateful I am to her for bringing me back to earth from the high I had been on since completing the marathon on the Great Wall of China three months prior. 

I believed my torrid affair with cancer had ended twelve months earlier when I was given the ‘all clear’ during the London Olympics. I even completed a marathon on the Great Wall to show everyone how recovered I was. I had beaten cancer; I felt indestructible. An ego like mine loved hearing how courageous and inspiring I was. Then I met this young woman and realised that she was the courageous one. She just needed a little help to face this massive ordeal in her life. She could have run away from her brother’s illness and let her parents deal with it. But courage is when you’re given the option to run away from responsibility, yet you choose the difficult option of staying. Particularly when your choice is made for the benefit of others. However cancer patients don’t have a choice. It does not matter whether we have courage or not, we just have to get on with life as best we can.

The following morning was my penultimate day at work before the family and I were heading for our summer holiday in Italy. There were just a few loose ends to tie up. Janette, my partner, was focused on finishing the annual tax returns for my chiropractic practice, ‘Spinal Joint’, finished before we left. And me? I was thinking about my tennis match that afternoon; victory would put me top of the league table. 

Before the match, I had the small matter of receiving my scan results from my first annual check-up at the Royal Marsden. I had planned to ask my consultant to sign the ‘Great Wall’ t-shirt, I was presented with after completing the marathon which I then hoped to make my profile picture on Facebook.

However I did not recognise this consultant, however. ‘Where is Sheela?’ I asked. Sheela Rao had become my main oncologist through treatment at the Royal Marsden. She had a sense of humour and it helped when I could joke around with her during visits.

‘Sheela is on annual leave’, the consultant responded with an uninspiring expression on her face, like someone tasting Marmite for the first time. 

‘I told the scan people I was happy to have this appointment when I got back from my holiday.’

‘We thought it was better you came in before. So how are you feeling, Mr Lanigan?’ she asked in a tone that indicated she was not expecting a positive answer.

This was the moment I should’ve realised all was not well, but I had been thinking about my response to this question for months since my annual check-up had been arranged. I was given a platform and I wanted to pay homage to my ego. My face beamed with a smile.

I like to think I am a good storyteller who makes people laugh at the right moments, but not once did she crack a smile. ‘What a miserable cow’, I remember thinking. I had just completed one of the hardest marathons in the world, 12 months after major surgery and 12 cycles of chemotherapy, and she did not seem remotely interested. So I stopped talking.

After a pause, she announced that she had some bad news.

The first thing that came into my head was that she was going to tell me my car had been clamped. Parking is always a problem in hospitals and I had found this spot behind the bikes in the Marsden. While it could technically fit my small car, it was not a designated parking space.

‘The results of your scan are not good’, she clarified.

She waited for me to say something, but I was too preoccupied with trying to remain calm. Every time I had gone to get results from a consultant previously, I had brought my friend Rich Parkin to take notes, as this allowed me to concentrate on the questions I wanted to ask and remain relaxed while he focused on the answers. You want someone calm beside you when it feels like your world is collapsing. Complex health information is difficult to assimilate, especially when it’s not what you are hoping to hear. You only have 15 minutes with a consultant, so it’s important to have all your questions written down and someone else on hand to write down the answers. 

I was here to boast about my marathon, not to ask questions about her ‘bad news’. I could not think of a single question to ask. After another pause, which seemed to last an eternity, she continued. ‘Your cancer has returned, spread, and is incurable.’ My mouth was open but my brain was unable to formulate words.

Having qualified as a chiropractor in the 90s, I had been trained to read x-rays and MRI scans. When my rectal tumour first appeared on the screen during a colonoscopy in 2011, I was seeing the scan that would tell the ‘experts’ how serious the cancer was and whether the tumour had metastasised to my liver or found a hiding place in another part of my anatomy. Cancer is not a binary disease; the difference between stage 1 and stage 4 is perhaps similar to the difference between having a wart on a finger and gangrene in the arm. Worth remembering next time we hear a celebrity milking their ‘cancer scare’ story to the media.

‘Has it spread to my liver?’ I said with an air of confidence, trying to show the consultant that I wanted details and knew my stuff. 

‘No’, she replied.

Shit! Cancer spreading to my brain had always been a huge fear. 

‘Is it in my brain?’

‘No, it’s not in your brain, It’s in the lymph nodes around the aorta.’ 

‘Only lymph nodes!’ I thought with relief. If it was only a few nodes, they could be surgically removed; serious, though not necessarily terminal. Unfortunately, surgery in this area is too dangerous to perform. For this reason, surgeons frequently call this anatomical region ‘Tiger land’. 

‘How many lymph nodes are affected?’ I asked. 

‘They are not tennis balls’, she said in an exasperated tone and handed me the CT report, essentially implying that my questions would be better answered by reading the report myself. Every organ I would have considered at risk was listed as ‘clear’, but the final paragraph of the report began with the word ‘unfortunately’. My heart thumped heavily. I felt this knot tightening in my stomach. Cancer cells had metastasised distally to the lymph nodes; they were one and a half centimetres in diameter, spreading to other organs, and would eventually kill me. This consultant was telling me there was no hope.

It reminded me of that moment at the start of The Hunger Games when Katniss and Peeta eagerly sought survival advice from Hamish. He looked at them with pity and said, ‘Embrace the probability of your imminent death and know in your heart that there’s nothing I can do to save you.’

My cancer had spread to lymph nodes I didn’t even know existed. They surrounded the aorta and measured 15 mm in size. I must have stayed in bed the morning we had that anatomy lecture on lymphatic drainage of the pelvis at university.

I did not understand how this could be incurable. Lymph node spread is stage three, not stage four. My primary tumour was found in my rectum in April 2011 and had spread to only one lymph node. I was told I was lucky it had been caught early. The tumour and a few lymph nodes were removed and I received 12 cycles of chemo to prevent cells from spreading distally. And now this medical version of Hamish was telling me the average life expectancy was only 22 months, and I had to have more chemotherapy?

To be fair, the Registrar looked young and unseasoned, and I suspected that she had limited experience playing the ‘grim reaper’ to her patients. And who was I to critique a clinician’s bedside manner after my performance with my young patient the previous evening?

I can’t remember much more about the meeting. I was in shock as I left. How could I have been terminally ill while running that marathon? Then I thought of my patient who in a strange way had prepared me for this awful news and brought my feet back to earth. I once again began thinking how lucky I was that it was me and not one of my girls.

As I got out onto the road, I started noticing things that I had always taken for granted: the trees, the different sounds of the traffic. The phone rang; it was Janette.

‘How did it go?’ 

‘Not very good. The cancer is back and they say it is incurable. They have given me 22 months.’

‘That’s not funny’, she said in an exasperated tone. ‘How did it go?’

I started laughing. ‘It’s true! Twenty-two months is all you have to put up with me for.’

‘Stop it, you’re not funny’, she said. ‘What happened?’ 

‘I told you’, I laughed harder, thinking back to the reactions I got when I announced I had cancer on the first of April 2011, not realising that it was April Fool’s Day.

‘Stop it now.’

This continued until she asked me to swear on the girls’ lives. I did, and there was a pause at the end of the line. 

‘What are you going to say to them?’ she asked, her voice quivering. They were waiting for me at their grandparents’ house.

‘I will wait until you are home and then pick them up after my tennis match’, I responded flatly.

‘You’re still going to play tennis?’ she asked incredulously. 

Most of the useful things I have learned about dealing with people and adversity in life ARE from boarding school and competitive team sports. You don’t always get what you deserve in life, but good friends help you through the difficult times. In sports, teammates look after each other, and if the team is successful, positive emotions and memories bond you to each other for life. 

Individual sports are different: you are on your own, there are no hiding spots. Sports like tennis require great mental strength to succeed at, and many of the battles fought are with a player’s own self-belief and ability to cope under pressure. Sports commentators speak of a ‘pressure’: a putt to win the Ryder Cup, a penalty shot in the World Cup Final, a serve to win Wimbledon. All situations where the athlete is on their own. Now I was facing the ultimate pressure: death.

The ability to deal with pressure is key to success in sport, business, and life in general. Imagine, if you will, being asked to walk along a narrow length of wood. Placed on the ground, the challenge is laughably easy. Placed 20 feet up in the air with the added prospect of falling, it becomes unimaginably difficult. 

I have always considered mental strength to be very important and this news gave me the opportunity to show Frederik what it truly meant. I was going to play my tennis match as planned and I was going to win. I would only think about the cancer prognosis afterwards. 

I phoned Frederik to tell him what the consultant had said and could immediately hear the emotion in his voice. The grim reaper had visited Frederik’s house the previous year and taken both his 17-year-old sister Thea and his stepfather within weeks of each other. His strength for me that day showed me that his mental fortitude was much stronger than I had ever given him credit for. 

When I began telling others about my diagnosis in 2011, reactions varied. Some people would get very upset. Frederik knew how uncomfortable crying made me. What can you do? I might have thought they were silly getting so upset, but I would not want to tell another person how they should feel about something. I would never feel sorry for myself and the last thing I would ever want from someone else is pity. Shit happens, people die, life goes on, and everyone does the best they can and I had a tennis match to play.

The sun was out when I arrived at the tennis club. Probably for the first time, I observed the normality of people coming and going in a sports club. I thought how nice it would be, if the world were to stop turning, to give me time to absorb the traumatic news I had just received. Of course life is not like that and I am not the only person with problems to deal with. 

I won the toss and proceeded to serve. My opponent had not won a single match in the league, and as soon as we started hitting I could see why. After winning the first game to fifteen (he got lucky on a mishit return), we changed sides. I walked to the other side like a peacock flaunting his beautiful feathers. I was probably 20 years older than this guy and was going to show him no mercy. I got into the ready position to receive his serve.  

He wound up and hit his first serve limply into the net. As I waited for the second in the hot sun, I was consumed with an overwhelming feeling of coldness; a chill so complete that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. I could see goose bumps on my arms and became aware of a voice in my head, saying, ‘You are going to die, you are not not going to see your girls grow up.’ I didn’t even notice where the second serve landed. My opponent moved to the other side of the court for his next serve, looking pleased with himself as he shouted, ‘Fifteen-love’. 

His next serve was set up to be drilled down the line, but my legs and arms had turned to jelly, so my return was out. ‘Thirty-love’, he shouted. I wanted to show Frederik how strong I was, but I had nothing. There on the court, I believed I had started to die. My future was disintegrating before my eyes and there was nothing anybody could do to help me. I lost the set 6-1.

At the changeover, my opponent was feeling really pleased with himself and asked me about the other opponents I had beaten in our league. I couldn’t take anymore of this slow torture. ‘I can’t play any more’, I said. ‘I have to go’. 

‘Why?’ he asked. He was no doubt expecting some sort of meagre excuse.

‘I have just been told that I only have a few months left to live and I don’t want to waste any more of my time on this.’

The look on his face was priceless. I was half-tempted to describe my cancer, the confirmed tragedy of my future, in excruciating detail. My response was ruining his first and only tennis peak. It’s a strange feeling having one side of your brain in such turmoil and the other side wanting to take the piss out of a complete stranger. But not even this could distract me from the truth: I had cracked and I knew it. The purpose of me being there was to show Frederik how strong I was and I had failed. I had reached breaking point and just wanted to return home to my girls.

Cancer was now in control of me and I was falling apart. The tennis match was a perfect analogy for what was about to happen to my life, and my kids were going to bear witness to it. I sobbed as I drove to pick up the girls, wallowing in my own self-pity. If I couldn’t even beat that guy, I was no match for cancer. As McGreggor would say in Dad’s Army, I was “doomed”. I felt pathetic, but like so many times before, it was my young children who helped me get a grip. 

 After the tennis I drove to Janette’s parents’ house. They did not say much, I could see they knew from the sadness in their eyes. We were just out of their driveway  and Isabelle asked what the doctors had said. I had never hidden anything from the kids – death is an inevitable part of life and it is daft to think you can protect anyone from it, including your own children. It was just unfortunate they were so young. But, in my opinion, the longer the children had to get used to the idea, the easier it would be when the time came.

‘We will talk about it when Mammy comes home, I replied.

Like a dog with a bone, Isabelle wouldn’t let go and repeated the question. I fobbed her off again. 

‘The cancer is back, isn’t it?’

‘Wait until Mammy gets home. We will talk about it then.’

 She repeated, ‘The cancer is back, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

 ‘Are you going to die?’

‘Yes.’

Not much was said for the rest of the journey. Cancer is something that never leaves you, even after getting the all clear and believing you are cured, aches and pains create sinister thoughts, and tension headaches become ‘brain tumours’.

After we got home, Molly disappeared. I knew that she was in her room crying, but there wasn’t a lot I could say until Janette got home from work. When children are upset, you are supposed to tell them that it’s going to be alright. But I could not lie; it was not going to be alright. I was going to die and they would have to cope without me and that’s why I left her to it until she was ready to come down and talk.

I considered the facts that there must be advantages to knowing in advance and that 22 months was only an average. There must be some hope. I looked up metastasis to para-aortic lymph nodes on PubMed, but quickly realised that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. According to the medical literature in 2013, no one in my situation had survived more than 4 years. I was well and truly fucked. I clung on to my last hope: that my usual consultant, Sheela Rao, would be back the following week and would call me. Perhaps they had mixed up my scan with someone else’s and she would tell me it was all a mistake.

At that point, I had documented every stage of my cancer experience on Facebook, but now had neither the will nor desire to share my news on social media. I had given many people hope that cancer could be beaten. I was contacted by cancer patients all the time, and while I did not want to get too involved in others’ journeys, it felt good to give them hope when doctors told them there was none. I had put myself up on a pedestal and it was not going to be pleasant falling off of it. I was not a unique fearless individual, after all, but would die a horrible death like everybody else. I decided not to say anything and only tell my closest friends.

John was the toughest man I had ever encountered on a football or hurling field. He won All-Ireland medals at school and university, as well as an inter-county minor for Kilkenny. For five years, we trained together at school, but I never came out on top of a challenge with him; he was far too quick and strong. Sometimes, John would let me get to the ball first in training, so he could batter me and make everyone laugh, as I was not blessed with the speed to get away. 

John often dared me to tackle him and, in the manner of Robert the Bruce, I was always up for the challenge. He knew he was making me a better player by building character and determination. I described John as a ‘Neanderthal man’, and at university, he even grew a big bushy beard to look the part. In 1980, however, John chose to focus on his science career over sports. I couldn’t believe it; I wanted so much to have his athletic ability but he was voluntarily giving it up. Years ahead of his time, he was instead committing to saving the planet’s oceans and rivers.

The neck surgery John had for his cancer in 2005 had condemned him to a life of constant shoulder and neck pain. Radiotherapy had additionally destroyed his saliva glands and left him with persistent dry mouth. But he survived, and as a survivor, the news that it had come back in a friend was a major blow and a reminder of his continued vulnerability to the ‘Emperor of all Maladies’, cancer.

John was silent on the line after hearing my news. I broke the tension with a joke. ‘I am finally going to beat you in a race’, I said, and we laughed. Little did we know the race was not over, and as we spoke, an aggressive tumour was growing in John’s brain which would be discovered within the next few months.

Rob Trew, a chiropractic colleague, made me laugh when we spoke. He told me how he had lunch with a friend that afternoon who had just been diagnosed with cancer. He had shared my ‘inspirational’ story and now he would have to call his friend back and say, ‘Forget it, it’s a mistake, Richard is going to die after all.’ 

When you hear devastating news, you wonder how you will ever laugh again, but it’s surprising how quickly humans can adapt to heartbreak when they have good people around them. I Skyped my sister Eleanor who gave me the standard, ‘Fuck off with your dying shit’, followed by our usual banter. She is two years younger than me, so my mother was always begging me to be nice to her. But that was never going to happen. Eleanor was the blotting paper for my black humour and I tormented her and her friends. 

After our conversation ended, she incorrectly assumed she had disconnected and began to weep. I was deeply moved by the sight, but started laughing and taking the piss immediately; you would have to understand the relationship I have with Eleanor to appreciate my reaction. Upon hearing my voice, Eleanor pulled herself together and laughed along with me. The more I took the piss, the more we laughed. I said, ‘Mammy said you hated me’, which only prompted more laughter.

Then I called Ole Wessung, a Danish entrepreneur, chiropractor and motivational speaker. In the late 80s, Ole came up with the idea of bike sharing which is now commonplace in all major cities across Europe. He spent thousands designing the prototype bike (‘By Cyklen’), which I dismissed as the stupidest idea ever. ‘Everyone in Copenhagen owns a bike’, I said.

‘No!’

‘You said this was the hardest thing you had ever done in your life.’ 

‘Yes, it was.’ 

‘No it won’t be’, said Ole. ‘That was just the training for what you are about to do now. You are such a show-off that beating stage 3 cancer was never going to be enough for you. You had to wait until the doctors said there was no hope just so you could prove them wrong.’

I guess it had a nice ring for those attending Ole’s motivational seminars, but I had to wonder if things like that really happened in real life. While it brought a smile to my face, in reality, I knew I was fucked. But then again, no one gave Muhammad Ali a chance against George Foreman in ‘74, Arsenal in their last match against Liverpool in ‘89, Denmark in the ‘92 Euros, or the NBAs Cavaliers against the Warriors in 2016. My seven-year-old daughter only picked the winning horse in the Grand National at 100 to 1 odds because she liked the jockey’s colours. It was a reminder to always keep hope alive, because without it, you might as well be dead. 

September, 2015: 25 months away, to see my twin daughters Molly and Isabelle off to secondary school;

March 21st, 2017: 40 months away, to ring in my 60th Birthday; and

September, 2017: 49 months away, to see my youngest daughter off to secondary school. 

Achieving all three would mean that my outcome had veered well into miracle territory, as no one had yet lived that long, but I optimistically planned to beat the record by one month. And if I was still alive in 2018, I vowed to write a book.                                                      

As Ole had said, the China marathon was only me ‘rolling the rock back’. I had to add an additional flourish and show it was possible to live well with terminal cancer and survive, despite what the experts were predicting.