Rob, Smith, patient, story, stories
Rob Smith's story: Alberta Cancer Board patient
Fall of Destiny
Rob Smith remembers carrying a piece of furniture up the stairs at home and feeling a bit dizzy. His next memory is of waking up in the hospital and wondering what happened.
What happened was a major heart attack, 20 minutes of CPR administered by his wife, five shocks to the heart by the paramedics and three days in an induced coma to reduce stress on his heart. The cause of the heart attack? A rare anomaly of the experimental chemotherapy drug that, in another instance, had saved his life.
Smith was 39 years old with four young children when he was diagnosed with colorectal cancer. “Unless you have been through this, you can’t really understand what it is like,” he says. Smith felt angry, scared and alone.
Throughout the treatments, the recovery period and the setbacks, the hardest part for him was watching his children: “It is so hard for the ones standing on the sidelines,” he says. “It is very difficult for them to deal with this.”
Smith credits his recovery to the dogged efforts of his general practitioner in finding the cancer before it progressed substantially and to his aggressive chemotherapy. He also determined early on that “the cancer was not going to win.”
But Smith had no idea what a struggle it would be to stay the course.
Shortly after diagnosis he had surgery that revealed his stage three cancer had seeped into a couple of lymph nodes. Treatment with an experimental anti-metabolite chemotherapy drug was recommended. Anti-metabolite drugs stop cells from making and repairing DNA, a process cancer cells also need to grow and multiply. He “felt like hell” during the weeks he received the chemotherapy, but paradoxically felt better than he had in years on his off weeks from treatment when he managed to go for walks three times each day.
Smith has a clearer appreciation of what is important in life now. He feels a deep gratitude for every day and a determination to “leave something worthwhile behind.” A non-fiction writer by profession, he switched to fiction to express his experience with cancer and the resulting book, Fall of Destiny, is being released later this year.
For Smith, it’s a different life now, and even though the cancer has been in remission for more than five years, it remains a niggling threat. “It’s always there on my shoulders … but cancer is an infinitely survivable thing. Grit your teeth, stand up to it, don’t let it win.”
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