My name's David Iron. I'm 56 years of age, and I live in Faversham. I've had three primary
cancers. The first one was melanoma, the second one
was lymphoma, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, that was advanced stage,
and the third primary cancer was a medium-stage bowel cancer.
After the skin cancer, nothing happened for eight years. My doctor, who was also a personal
friend, said to me that I appeared to have some lumps around my neck.
I had various scans, and that identified exactly what it was and what the stage was.
Pretty much all the lymph nodes that they could see were starting to swell. I was aware
that the stem cell transplant was risky. The lead doctor, who was in charge of giving
it to me, said that the risks were low at that stage. But still,
because you're quite close to death, it's still all quite a nerve-racking thing at the time.
The harvesting of the stem-cells was done
over two or three hours. I was lying on a hospital bed.
There was a large machine next to me, which I was hooked up to, with tubes taking the
blood from me into and around the centrifuge, and then back
in again, and they showed me at the end, this bag of stem cells, and they took them away
to be frozen. When I went into hospital, I was there for
a week, while they gave me large amounts of high-dose chemotherapy, and at that point
my own stem cells were simply put back into my own body.
It took a few moments. There was one major complication I had. I was diagnosed with pneumonia,
just when my body was least able to fight it.
But the very next day, the week after I got the pneumonia, the daily blood test showed
that I had a tiny, tiny amount of new, white blood cells.
And that amount grew, it was like a straight line up the graph, from the bottom.
I had no white blood cells right at the bottom of the graph, and then, a tiny amount, and
then more, and then more, and then more, and it went
up in kind of a straight line, and on the third day, still very low blood count,
but enough to do something,
I felt genuine recovery.
A couple of days after that, the nurse came in and said 'here's a slice of bread and butter'.
So, she cut it in two, and I took a mouthful, of the middle of it, not the crust, just the
middle. And it went all the way through into my stomach,
and that was fantastic, because I was also starting to feel hungry.
And that proved to everybody that the body was definitely on the mend. Basic functions
were restored, and two days later, I was sent home.
I've been living with cancer for 17 years now. It's part of my life. Most people I come
across don't know I've got it. Life goes on. I work, I play. I play the role
of father, husband, all these things go on, We just do what we need to do,
to survive, and continue the family.
For information, help, or if you just want to chat,
call the Macmillan Support Line on 0808 808 0000, or visit macmillan.org.uk