The title says it all.  How does a talented, intelligent young man grow up, pursue a career and find a life partner, with cancer sitting on his shoulder?

A fifteen year old shouldn’t get cancer at all – but Mark did – a malignant melanoma. Treatment at the time was to remove the tumour and cross your fingers. Because there was little else available, and a high chance the cancer would return.

55% five year survival; 50% ten year survival – these were the stark figures Mark heard during a medical lecture on melanoma, four years later. Yes, Mark was studying medicine – partly to help others but also to give himself the best chance. In which 50% would he fall? Would he even get to qualify as a doctor?

He did – but a severe stomach pain shattered the reprieve and on his 27^th birthday he learned that his cancer was back.

There was some hope though. Research had made massive leaps, and a new treatment could specifically target an abnormal protein found in 50% of melanomas. Would he be in the right 50% this time? He was, and started Dabrafenib. The tumours shrank, but didn’t disappear.

Importantly Mark felt better and grabbed the opportunity to live – really live.  He wrote a bucket list, ticking off every country in Europe with his twin brother, and arranged a big party in Malta. He raised money for Cancer Research UK. Within a few days he’d raised £20,000. (Today his fund is well over £200,000).

He wrote a blog. Through writing and fund-raising he raised awareness of melanoma and received numerous awards, and he gave many talks. At one of these Mark experienced another major life-event – LOVE. Georgie, a pretty medical student didn’t shy away from Mark’s frightening diagnosis. They were drawn together immediately and supported each other throughout, even training for a half marathon – an incredible achievement for someone with melanoma.

Mark gives a perceptive insight into being a patient and a doctor. He quickly learned that a consultant audience probably meant bad news; and he could spot ‘Palliative Care Team’ on a name badge from a distance.

His bravery throughout is humbling. We read how he dealt with hope, later to be dashed; unbelievable medical traumas – sepsis, stroke, excruciating headaches and stomach pain; the horror of finding his brain was full of tumours; his fight to get back to medical work and normality; his eventual acceptance of his fate.

Incredibly during all this, he wrote his book, which he almost finished – his mother, a publisher and poet, wrote the final chapter.

It is a journey of love, bravery, medical explanations and patient experience. I can highly recommend it.

Available at Poetryspace and on Amazon. Proceeds go to Cancer Research UK.

Splitting Sunlight, a collection of poems by his mother, Susan Sims, about Mark’s cancer from her viewpoint, will be published by Dempsey & Windle in January 2019.

 

By Dr K Thompson, author of From Both Ends of the Stethoscope: Getting through breast cancer – by a doctor who knows

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01A7DM42Q http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01A7DM42Q

http://faitobooks.co,uk