Cancer facilities for the young still a scandal

Last week a national news story broke that made me feel a jarring sense of personal guilt. Well, perhaps guilt is an overstatement, but after reading a headline I was gripped by an urge of personal responsibility to respond.

This rarely happens; the last time I protested it was against the introduction of college student fees, which suited my own financial situation and could be seen as a little self-serving.

Last week, however, I was confronted by a relatively common story of mortality. Relatively common, that is, when you consider how many families are affected by blood diseases and cancer. Only this tale of mortality concerned a teenage boy, Donal Walsh, and I fell silent to the long-standing knowledge that on more than one occasion his fate could have been mine.

In 2003 friends of my family organised a charity race in Wexford to raise funds for the interior renovation of St John's Ward in Crumlin children's hospital, where I was a patient. More than €10,000 was raised, and giving the staff the cheque was one of the happiest moments of my life.

Pre-Celtic Tiger pre fab
A decade later, the ward still resembles a pre-Celtic Tiger prefab, despite tireless campaigns by my world class doctors, Aengus O'Marcaigh and Owen Smith, and others, for better facilities. A decade after I was there, another teenager in my position had to go through all the same obstacles in getting cancer treatment in this country.

But I was luckier than he was. My cancer was treatable, his was not. He had to go through all the hardships, without reaching the end reward – which was life, just a chance to give it a decent shot.

I’m lucky, I live a life that I love living, with friends that I love being around. It took me a while, after all my treatments, to adapt to just living and behaving in a normal manner again. But I know that for every person who suffered through cancer in childhood, and especially every teenager, I’m in the higher numbers of the statistic. I’m of the percentage that gets the most press, the kind that people talk about when they talk about childhood cancer.

But still so many die, in disgracefully underfunded surroundings, with overworked staff and a general hospitals policy that seems to be preparing for a site closure rather than a long-term policy of saving the highest possible number of lives.

One element of the Donal Walsh story struck me as a particularly difficult reminder of my own situation, namely Donal’s comments against suicide and the response they generated.

It was very difficult for me to adapt to normality when I was first given the all-clear. The hardest thing to discuss openly about my illness is the fact that for some years during and after my initial treatment, I suffered from what was diagnosed as bipolar depression.

Mood swings are of course a common reaction to cancer medications, but when you’re a 16-year-old boy who hasn’t smiled or had a positive thought for weeks then you need to talk to a professional who deals with depression.

I felt hopeless, useless and at times I didn’t think I had anything more to learn or gain from life. At a time when like many other teenage boys all I wanted to do was play in a band or chase girls, it just wasn’t happening for me. It was this sense of isolation and unattainable ambition that I felt in myself that was the most difficult result of tackling my illness – not the chemo, not the relapse, not sitting the Leaving Cert nine months after my bone marrow transplant. That was just the tedious stuff that needed to be done.

What happened after all that was what I found to be the difficult side of my admittedly unusual teenage life. I wouldn’t be able to speak about that now if it wasn’t for the work of mental health organisations such as Aware. Depression is as great a threat to this country’s young people as any other illness and it should be regarded as such. Depression sufferers in this society should be listened to, not chastised about how they react in their own fight for life.

During the Celtic Tiger it was fashionable to talk about improvements in childhood terminal illness in Ireland, but it wasn’t an idea practical enough for a boom-time government to find investment-worthy. Let’s not make the same mistakes when the country starts making tax returns in the plus figures once again.