Horticulturist Peter Dowdall has beaten cancer twice and wants more facilities where men can bank sperm before being treated, so they can have children, writes CLAIRE O'CONNELL.
I WAS 21 when I got first got cancer. I had gone to college in England, came back in 1994, and I was your normal, typical 21 year old. I drank and smoked, but I was fit and I played rugby. I was healthy.
Then I got this lump on my neck. It just seemed to come up overnight and at first I presumed it was just swollen glands – but it was too big to ignore. It was so huge I couldn’t tie the second button on my shirt.
The GP gave me a course of antibiotics and said to come back in a week if it didn’t work. It didn’t work, so I went for a biopsy and it turned out to be Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of the immune system.
I was shocked, but I stayed positive about it. There was no question in my head – I’d just do the treatment and get over it.
The treatment itself was pretty horrendous. It involved chemotherapy for 12 months and then a month of radiotherapy. The chemotherapy worked but it didn’t agree with me, I was one of the bad candidates for it.
And after that, the radiotherapy was a walk in the park – it was like getting an X-ray and a patch of sunburn on the area. And that was it; the doctors said “best of luck now”, and off I went.
I had to come back every few months for scans at first, but it was fine for a few years.
I got on with life and I set up my own business – a garden centre attached to an old family estate in Cork. We opened in 1997, but shortly after that I started getting sick again.
I was run down, I had no energy and I was vomiting. I’m 6ft 4ins and I went down to 11 stone, which for me was like a skeleton.
I must have had every test you could do in a hospital in Ireland at the time, but I wouldn’t allow myself to think it was a relapse. In my head I had done the cancer thing, boxed it away and moved on.
But one of the tests came back and said the cancer had returned. That second diagnosis was much harder than the first one. The first time you get it, you deal with it, you go through the treatment and box it off – and then it comes back and that’s a real kick.
So after the treatment for that cancer I went for a stem cell transplant, which 10 years ago was very cutting edge.
To all intents and purposes it’s the same as a bone marrow transplant, but it uses your own stem cells so there’s no fear of rejection. They took the stem cells from me before the chemo and radiotherapy and froze them, then at the end of the normal treatment regime they gave me enough chemo over 10 days to bring all my blood counts down to zero.
Next they put my stem cells back, and it took about a month for them to kick in. To be honest I was bored during that month, just sitting around. I had to be isolated in order to protect against any infection, and everyone had to wash and scrub up before even coming in to say hello – the common cold would have killed me.
But in time the stem cells built a brand new immune system – I even needed to have my childhood immunisations again. So I say now my system is only 10 years old.
And since then I have built up the business and I present on television, and I’m also writing a book.
But a big issue for me arising from the whole experience was that at the time of the first diagnosis, which was in 1994, the doctor mentioned one of the possible side effects of the treatment for males was the possibility of becoming infertile. Like all of these things it’s very individual, even with your hair, some lose it some won’t - with your fertility some people lose it some don’t. And they really can’t say in advance, so he advised me to bank my sperm if I wanted kids in later life. I said excellent, perfect. I was 21 at the time and not thinking of having kids right then, but the problem was you couldn’t do this in Ireland.
So off I went to England and I banked my sperm at a hospital over there. Thankfully I could afford the money and the time before the treatment to do it, a lot of the time people couldn’t.
Then when I got better the first time I thought this is crazy, it’s despicable that a 21 year old is told he has got cancer and he can’t bank sperm here – that we don’t care about it in this country.
So I contacted the Department of Health, but the then minister barely acknowledged my letters. I talked to all the politicians I could, but no one was going to grasp it because of the ethical, legal and moral issues.
I was getting nowhere with the Irish government so I went to Europe. They decided this was a valid problem and it ended up getting discussed in the European parliament.
Then, in fairness to Micheál Martin, the first week after he was made Minister for Health he launched the commission to look into assisted reproduction, and one of the upshots is that we now have the facility for cancer patients to bank sperm at the Rotunda.
I was delighted that I had any part in changing the system, but from the start I said, not only do I want this to be done in Ireland, I want it in every hospital that treats cancer patients here.
Because, realistically, for someone from Tralee or Donegal, sometimes it’s easier to go to London than to Dublin. And I know with cutbacks at the moment it’s probably the wrong time to be screaming for it, but it’s tiny money to set up these labs and I want them in every hospital in the country that treats cancer patients.
Because I got that opportunity, and while I don’t have kids, I still have a choice.
Meanwhile, it might be a cliché but my time being sick has really made me appreciate life. When you run your own business there are problems, but I don’t mind if the banks put me under pressure or if cashflow is an issue, these are very surmountable problems. I think, well at least I am not in hospital. I know I can handle what’s thrown at me now.
Peter Dowdall is a gardening expert on the RTÉ programme Corrigan's City Farm, which has enlisted 23 volunteers to become self-sufficient and grow their own produce