Cancer-stricken mayor fights to get surgery
Potentially life-saving U.S. procedure
Late last year, Hector Macmillan was getting pains in his back. The long- time mayor of a little Ontario town figured it was probably from staying awake too late watching TV news and falling asleep on the couch. The pains got worse, though, when he ate — a bad sign, according to what he read on the Internet.
So 58-year-old from Trent Hills, Ont., went in for tests. Five years before, he had overcome esophageal cancer. By January, after several appointments, he was hearing another diagnosis: pancreatic cancer, stage IV. He would probably be dead by Christmas, doctors told him.
Now, he’s launched a public campaign against the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care to persuade it to pay US$ 250,000 for a potentially life- saving procedure available in the United States.
The new treatment, however, is considered experimental in the province and was also deemed inappropriate in Macmillan’s case, so the Ontario Health Insurance Plan won’t pick up the tab.
The father of four ( and grandfather of seven) has been mayor in Trent Hills, northwest of Belleville, for 13 years, on a salary of roughly $ 30,000. Just before he was diagnosed, he and his wife bought a bowling alley and pub in the town, double-mortgaging their house to pay for their acquisition.
But renovations have left it “gutted to rat sh— t,” and Macmillan is scrambling to put it back together in case he needs to sell it to fund the surgery. An online fundraising campaign, set up by the local fire department, will help too — it had raised $13,500 by Wednesday night.
“Whether I get the surgery or not — that’s secondary,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong, I want it. I want it desperately. I want to live. I’ve got lots to offer.
“But under the assumption that I’m going to die of this, I want the ones following me to get help because it’s out there and they don’t know that.”
Fresh from hearing the ministry’s refusal last week, Macmillan was at an Association for Municipalities of Ontario meeting, where local leaders get the opportunity to question provincial ministers — an exercise known informally as the “bear pit.”
His question was for Ontario Health Minister Eric Hoskins.
He laid out his case, pausing repeatedly to stop himself from crying.
There is a new procedure available, he told Hoskins: irreversible electroporation, or the NanoKnife, which uses needles to deliver highvoltage electrical impulses and kill cancer cells without damaging anything else.
The University Health Network in Toronto has a NanoKnife, but it is only used in select circumstances for liver cancer tumours — when traditional methods aren’t an option.
Macmillan said he flew to Kentucky to meet a doctor in Louisville who was confident he could complete an operation within days.
“( The procedure) is only considered experimental in Ontario because you don’t want to pay for it,” he told Hoskins. “Mr. Minister, why are you killing us? And are you really just going to let me die?”
“I can’t begin to imagine what you are going through,” Hoskins replied.
“This is by far the most difficult part of my job as minister of health — to look individuals like yourself in the eyes and try to do my best to make services available that i n many cases prove to be life-saving.”
A spokesman in Hoskins’ office emphasized that the minister isn’t authorized, under the Health Insurance Act and Regulation, to “to accept an application or overturn an application.”
“Out- of- country care cannot be provided without a physician’s signature and support from an Ontario specialist,” Shae Greenfield said in an email, adding Hoskins had asked the ministry to look into the case and “confirmed that all appropriate processes were followed as part of the decision.”
In refusing to pay for treatment in the U. S., the ministry says more research is needed to determine the efficacy of the procedure on pancreatic tumours.
Use of NanoKnife on pancreatic cancer patients “is still to be fully considered” by the specialists at Toronto General Hospital, the only place where the surgeries are performed. In any case, there’s no evidence it is effective for people with stage IV pancreatic cancer.
For his part, Macmillan says the tumour has shrunk and the cancer that had spread to lymph nodes in his chest is gone — after several rounds of chemo and doses of an alternative medicine from Mexico — technically bumping him down to stage III.
Wednesday, he was in the process of appealing the decision.
“In Kentucky, I’m stage III,” he said.
Currently, his doctors in Ontario are offering “palliative chemotherapy.”
When they told him that, he responded, “Don’t ever use that word ‘ palliative’ around me again.
“You don’t know me very well. I will go down fighting ... Til the day they plant me, buddy.”