My cancer diagnosis and 'The Day the Earth Stood Still'

ROBERT Minton-Taylor recently learned he has six years to live after being diagnosed with advanced cancer. Here, the 76-year old journalist turned public relations practitioner who lives in Cononley describes how he is coming to terms with the likelihood of never reaching 100.?

MAY 13, 2024, will forever be etched into my life as ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’. It’s the day I learned I have Stage 4 prostate cancer.

The urology consultant said that a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan taken days earlier showed cancer of the prostate and that it has spread. I’m in shock.

Barely four weeks later, following computed tomography (CT) and bone scans and a multi-needle prostate biopsy, I walk into the Richardson Suite cancer unit at Airedale Hospital.

I’m struck by how many people are waiting, male and female, young and old. It hits home that cancer affects so many people - three million in the UK. Apparently, one in two people will develop some form of cancer in their lifetime.

The consultant oncologist confirms the cancer has spread to my hips, spine, bones and lymph nodes. Because the cancer is in my bones it’s terminal. I look across to my wife Caroline, a former intensive care nurse, and she looks crestfallen.

Prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing is the standard procedure for detecting prostate cancer. Unfortunately, mine is a non-PSA secreting prostate cancer. It’s rare - just two per cent - so PSA checks didn’t detect it.

The NHS admits, “PSA tests are unreliable and can suggest prostate cancer when no cancer exists (a false-positive result)”. However, it is currently the only prostate blood test available. Regular MRI screening, like breast screening, would be a definitive bonus.

If you are aged 50 or over, and especially black, the chances of developing prostate cancer are greater. Please, if you have an increased urge to pee, strain to pee or have groin pain, talk to your GP.

I’m prescribed a new wonder hormone therapy called Darolutamide to take alongside a second hormone, Prostap. Combined with an 18 week intravenous course of Docetaxel, a strong chemotherapy drug, it will give me around six more years on planet earth.

As I also suffer from osteopenia (reduced bone density) I’m at risk too of Metastatic Spinal Cord Compression (MSCC) and becoming paralysed.

I am told not to lift anything heavier than an iron. That’s good because I enjoy ironing. The list goes on. No twisting of the hips, no carrying suitcases, no reaching up for things on shelves. I need a butler fast.

I’ve got to eat healthily, cut my 16 units of alcohol a week down and go on walks, but perhaps not like The Hardest Geezer who walked Africa. But take it from me don’t bother with nought per cent red wine, it tastes like Ribena.

This is becoming a tension-fuelled day although not as disappointing as seeing England lose to Spain at Euro 2024. I feel my life is hitting a brick wall.

A week later I am boarding ‘Christine’, a gleaming white mobile cancer care unit run in partnership with the charity ‘Hope for Tomorrow’ to sign the consent forms for my treatment.

I stare at the words on the page dumb-founded: The drugs: “cannot cure the tumour, so it is expected that… at some point it will regrow…. It is hoped that the treatment will also achieve a useful prolongation of life.” My care is just palliative. And I thought I’d live long enough at to get a 100-year old birthday card from the King!

It is a cruel irony that I won’t live as long as my father an 8th Army ‘Desert Rats’ officer who in WW2 survived Dunkirk and fought at El Alamein. For one fleeting moment I wonder if the treatment is really worth it. Then I realise I’m married to the love of my life Caroline who has been my rock and my soulmate for 38 years and I have two great sons. It would be selfish and irresponsible not to have the treatment.

As the patient, you accept your fate, but it is hard for your partner, family and friends to see your gradual decline.

My cancer treatment will cost upwards of ￡1 million. I reflect that it’s barely five years ago that Bradford Royal Infirmary saved my life and Airedale General Hospital rehabilitated me from a paralysing stroke.

Everyone I meet at Airedale Hospital is unfailingly sympathetic, kind and caring. I marvel at how, under such pressure, the clinical staff deliver such a wonderful service that is free at the point of delivery to everyone.

The NHS may be ‘broken,’ but with a new Airedale hospital due by 2030 and with Wes Streeting, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care at the helm, there is real hope for the future.

A few days later a consultant radiologist is putting in a PICC line (peripherally inserted central catheter) - which goes into a vein from my elbow to my heart to deliver intravenous chemotherapy. It’s a work of art.

The following day I’m on the Haematology and Oncology Day Unit (HODU) to receive my first chemotherapy dose.

To while away the time I’m reading ‘Living On A Thin Line’ by the legendary lead guitarist of The Kinks, Dave Davies. His power cord intro to “You’ve Really Got Me” changed rock and propelled the band to stardom in 1964. The book’s title seems to sum up my current predicament perfectly.

I found Prostate Cancer UK a https://prostatecanceruk.org/ and Macmillan Cancer Support https://www.macmillan.org.uk/ excellent sources of information.

You can read my posts by joining me as a friend on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/mintontaylor .

Robert Minton-Taylor is a visiting fellow of Leeds Beckett University, serves on the Professional Standards Panel of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations and is a stroke advisor to the West Yorkshire Association of Acute Trusts. He is a public governor, South Craven, Airedale NHS Foundation Trust, but has authored this article in a private capacity

NOTE: This article was first published online by the Craven Herald and Pioneer on 27 July 2024. I was invited by the paper to submit a piece on my prostate cancer. Yes, I had written blogs about my treatment to try and come to terms with my devastating terminal diagnosis. But I wasn’t at all sure about submitting an article for the Newsquest Media Group on the subject. But as the journalist who invited me to submit the piece agreed "If just one man refers himself to his GP reading your article we potentially may save a life." And, after all, if the amazing late Dame Deborah Anne James DBE could write about her bowel cancer by asking people to check their poo, I could surely write about the poorly engineered hidden male appendage called the prostate. No woman would have engineered such a ridiculously designed organ.