National Post (National Edition)
Cancer-stricken mayor fights to get surgery
Seeks coverage of life-saving U.S. procedure
Late last year, Hector Macmillan started getting pains in his back. The longtime mayor of a little Ontario town figured this was from staying awake too late watching the news and falling asleep on the couch. They got worse, though, when he ate — a concerning sign, according to what he read on the Internet.
So the official from Trent Hills went in for tests. Five years before, he had overcome cancer of the esophagus. After several appointments, he was hearing another diagnosis: pancreatic cancer, stage IV, they told him in January. He would probably be dead by Christmas,
No w, Ma cmillan has launched a public campaign against the Ontario Ministry of Health and LongTerm Care to persuade it to pay $250,000 for a potentially life-saving procedure that is available in the United States.
Unfortunately, the new treatment 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 58-year-old father of four (and grandfather of seven) has been mayor in Trent Hills, northwest of Belleville, for 13 years, on a salary of $30,000. Just before he was diagnosed in January, 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 told the National Post. “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 of 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 currently 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 remove the tumour within days.
“(The procedure) is only considered experimental in Ontario because you don’t want to pay for it,” Macmillan 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 in many cases prove to be life-saving.”
According to a letter from the ministry, however, more research is needed to determine the efficacy of the procedure on pancreatic tumours. And the 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 that NanoKnife is effective for people with stage IV cancer.
A spokesman for Hoskins also emphasized the minister cannot, under the under the Health Insurance Act and Regulation, “accept an application or overturn an application.”
“Out-of-country care cannot be provided without a physicians’ signature and support from an Ontario specialist,” Shae Greenfield said in an email.
For his part, Macmillan says the cancer that initially spread to lymph nodes in his chest is now gone — after several rounds of chemo and doses of an alternative medicine from Mexico.
Currently, his doctors in Ontario are offering him “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.”
ARE YOU REALLY JUST GOING TO LET ME DIE?