Monteiro diagnosed with cancer

CAMBRIDGE — Frank Monteiro, the tough old beat-cop-turned-city-councillor, wondered if he’d been collared by cancer and handed a sudden death sentence.

Tests results confirmed a lump on one of his kidneys is cancerous.

“How long have I got?” Monteiro asked doctors at St. Joseph’s Healthcare in Hamilton.

But Cambridge’s first Portuguese councillor — who patrolled the streets of Galt, Preston and Hespeler for 35 years — is hardly a goner with Wednesday’s diagnosis.

“What are you talking about? You’re going to live to be an old man,” a doctor replied.

“But I’m an old man already,” joked Monteiro, a grandfather of two.

But Monteiro, who turns 65 in June, was assured he’s going to live for many years. He’ll take four pills a day until the tumour, which is less than seven centimetres, shrinks down.

“Then, they’re going to remove the kidney,” he said.

Monteiro, who was in his regular bottom-ofthe-horseshoe council seat this week, already had a pretty good idea cancer was the likely diagnosis. A week-and-a-half earlier, doctors told him as much. The blood in his urine had prompted a series of tests.

And his daughter Taylor, a nurse at St. Mary’s Hospital, had insisted her father see a doctor regarding his health issues. So, he did.

But the official diagnosis still packed a devastating wallop.

“It’s a shock,” Monteiro said. “You sit there with no expression whatsoever on your face. You don’t know what to say, what to do, what to tell your kids, what to tell your friends. You just go numb.”

But friends and their personal stories have encouraged him. A Facebook friend told him she had a kidney removed 22 years ago and is doing wonderfully. Another friend, who works in local real estate, had a kidney removed 15 years ago.

“That kind of gives you a lift,” said Monteiro, who was 13 when his family moved to Canada from Santa Maria Island in the Azores.

Monteiro says other council members have been very supportive. He accepts there will be days when his medication, a type of chemotherapy, will make him nauseous and he won’t be able to go to his office at city hall.

“But I’m going to try my best,” he said on Thursday morning. “In fact, I’m just leaving for city hall now. At least when I go there, I’m busy and I’m talking to people.”

The old cop-turned-councillor is sure of one thing.

“Being sick is not a crime,” he said.