Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
We were in hospital more than our home.. but the staff carried us through
Mum’s gratitude after Shay cured of cancer
Nothing says “I love you” quite like a cake in the shape of a loo roll, featuring pictures from your wedding.
Alan Carr quipped his tasty toilet-themed treat was “too good for the downstairs loo”.
“You could have told me it was a cake?” quipped husband
Paul Drayton.
Shay at nine weeks old
DRIVING past the hospital he spent the first years of his life, Shay Knox can’t help but shout out, “That’s where I used to live”.
He was diagnosed with a rare condition when he was just weeks old which left him in and out of hospital for nearly three years.
Now four, the little fighter is looking forward to a bright future after doctors told his parents the cancer is now dormant.
Speaking to the Mirror, mum Susanne Mccusker, 30, said she was so proud of her son and the family are keen to raise awareness for the Children’s Cancer Unit Charity.
She added: “It felt like we were in the unit more than we were in our own home, and while this is probably the most difficult thing we have ever had to face, it was the work of the staff who made us feel like family, that carried us through.”
Susanne, who lives in Kilcoo, Co Down, with partner Mark Knox and sons Zach and Shay, spotted her boy’s first symptoms when he was days old.
SYMPTOMS
The first was spots on his skin that looked like blisters which she noticed when they were leaving hospital and he also had what looked like a sweat rash in his creases.
Shay deteriorated and was admitted to hospital at five-weeks-old because his breathing and feeding were poor and his colour was off.
Susanne said she knew in her gut something wasn’t quite right with her son.
On Zach’s second birthday, April 12, 2017, Shay was diagnosed with multisystem Langerhans’ cell histiocytosis, which only about 50 children in the UK are diagnosed each year.
Susanne added: “I was shocked, I just kept saying, ‘Can you even give a baby chemotherapy?’
“He never had his baby injections never mind chemotherapy because he had been sick.
“He did get home here and there but we practically lived there.
“We were coming up the road in the car a couple of weeks ago and he said, ‘Mummy, there’s where I used to live’.
“As you can imagine, a baby takes temperatures all the time and any time he took one we had to be admitted.
“So every time there was teeth and every infection we were up because he had no
I was shocked. I kept saying, ‘Can you even give a baby chemo’ SUSANNE MCCUSKER CO DOWN
immune system. Then we were in for a week or two because everything floored him, if he had the flu we
were in
HE’S MY BROTHER Shay and Zach Mccusker are great friends isolation for a week. The condition – which causes organ lesions – spread to Shay’s lungs, skin, skull and then progressed to the soft tissue of his sinus area and then his brain lining. His doctors had to consult with specialists in England and between them they decided on a new treatment – high dose chemotherapy.
Susanne said: “It was extremely hard. He had to get chemo every couple of hours, he was hospitalised for it. He had to get eye drops every two hours for 10 full days. “He wasn’t allowed out, we weren’t even allowed home in case of infection, he was on blood transfusions, platelets and antibiotics and antivirals and had feeding tubes.
“He did two cycles of that, around two to three months. He had already the guts of a year of chemo.”
After this, they noticed Shay’s condition began to improve and he started a maintenance chemotherapy which lasted one year and could be administered orally at home.
Susanne said: “We only ever got two weeks away from the hospital.
“From the start we had to go up every week to two weeks for bloods. It was constant for those two years and eight months.”
But the family got the good news that there was no active disease in December 2019 and Shay was able to ring the bell to signal the end of his treatment on December 18 that year.
Susanne added: “It was brilliant and we were just really proud because he was so sick for so long, we just wanted him to thrive. When he rang the bell it was like a symbol we can move on.”
And speaking about the Children’s Cancer Unit Charity on International Childhood Cancer Day tomorrow she said: “Our ask is for anyone who can, to support the charity.
“The practical support they provide for medical teams and families at an unthinkable time is invaluable. We wouldn’t be here without them.”
THE DNA from a hair found on “spy in a bag” Gareth Williams’s hand could solve the mystery of his death.
After the MI6 operative’s body was found in 2010, forensic scientists said the hair belonged to someone else but they could not extract a DNA profile from it.
But technical advances in the decade since mean this can now be done from just 2mm of hair, according to Prof Angela Gallop who founded the lab that carried out testing in the case.
Prof Gallop, who helped catch the killers of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence, said forensic investigators in the Williams case were “very good.. but there is always something new you can do, and 10 years is a long time”.
She told The Sunday Times: “They may have had difficulty if there wasn’t a root on the hair. Nowadays you can get a result out of a tiny length of hair, down to just two millimetres.
“This type of test can’t distinguish your DNA from that of your mother or any maternal relatives.
“However, it could be useful if you wanted to compare somebody specific with the result.”
The body of mathematician Williams, 31, was found naked inside a locked red holdall in the bath of his flat in Pimlico, Central London. The padlock was on the outside, while the keys were in the bag with him.
Williams worked for GCHQ but had then been seconded to the
Secret Intelligence Service and the flat where his body was found was a Security Service safe house flat.
Hamish Campbell, the detective who led the inquiry into his death, said DNA on the bag belonging to two unidentified people was worth review, along with DNA on a green towel in the flat.
Police also found a hair stuck to Williams’s hand.
The spy’s work focused on Russia, and it was claimed he had been working on tracing international moneylaundering routes used by organised crime groups including Moscowbased mafia. In 2013 Scotland Yard said he had probably died by accident as a result of getting into the bag on his own.
However, a year earlier an inquest had ruled he had probably been unlawfully killed by persons unknown.
The Metropolitan Police said there was no plan to conduct a review into the Williams case.
Prof Gallop helped bring Gary Dobson and David Norris to justice over the 1993 Lawrence murder after Scotland Yard asked for her help in 2006. Her team found the teenager’s blood on a jacket belonging to Dobson, a small hair on Norris’s clothing, and clothing fibres. The pair were jailed for life in 2012.
She also helped nail “Bullseye killer” John Cooper for the murder of Richard and Helen Thomas in 1985, and the 1989 murder of Peter and Gwenda Dixon.
IN a bloody scene in a pharmacy car park, participants in a sick wildlife killing contest unload the bodies of bobcats, grey foxes, coyotes and raccoons from their trucks.
More than 60 animals have been slaughtered over a 21-hour period, by competitors using assault rifles and other powerful weapons.
Shocking images show animals with gunshot wounds in their heads and bodies, some with their organs spilling out and faces partially destroyed.
The disturbing scenes were captured by investigators for Humane Society of the United
States, who went undercover at last month’s barbaric competition which took place in the city of De Leon, Texas, and is calling for such events to stop.
Judges awarded cash prizes for a “stringer hunt”, in which contestants who pay a £145 entry fee kill a coyote, fox, bobcat and raccoon.
The heaviest combined weight of the four animals wins first place.
One participant standing over a row of animals he has just slaughtered told an investigator: “I shot this one up here in the throat from high up and it blew out the whole bottom of his chest.”
Texas is thought to have more wildlife killing contests than any other state with at least 155 held there since 2015.
Some are organised by schools and churches, with children attending.
Investigators also attended another contest in Williamsport, Indiana, in December. Teams brought dead animals to be counted and weighed at the town’s fire station before enjoying a celebratory breakfast.
Campaigners say contestants frequently use cruel electronic calling devices to lure animals.
These mimic the sound of their young to lure in prey for an easy kill, which
often involves being shot with highpowered rifles, including AR-15S.
Afterwards, the bodies of the slaughtered are usually thrown in the bin.
They also say the contests orphan young animals, who are left to die from starvation, predation or exposure.
Arizona, California, Colorado, Massachusetts, New Mexico, Vermont and Washington have banned the events but they are legal in most states.
Kitty Block, HS USA president and CEO, said: “Killing wild animals with assault weapons to compete for the biggest piles of bodies to win cash and prizes, then throwing them away like trash, is downright barbaric. Bobcats, foxes, raccoons, coyotes and other species are central to a healthy ecosystem.
“This wanton bloodshed must stop.”
THE infiltration began three years earlier with the introduction of shinny new 5 and 10 pees – a 50p coin was then slipped in to kill off the ten bob note in ‘69 (it bravely limped on until November 22, 1970 when it became no longer legal tender) – all this being a subtle prerequisite to Monday, February 15, 1971 – D Day!
Yes, 50 years ago today, a young Lurgan teenager, and the rest of the people of the UK and
Ireland woke up to find that the pounds shillings and pence currency, that came into being in the Roman times, was now officially being replaced by new money, aka decimalisation.
To facilitate this history making event, the banks had been closed for four days before the changeover – currency converters were also made available for everyone, and the shops displayed prices in both old and new money – a decision made to placate the many who were sceptical that shopkeepers would use the occasion to be quids in.
So, having been advised from the cradle to look after your pennies (244 of them in total) and your pounds would look after themselves we discovered (if you were lucky enough) that our pockets didn’t need to hold as much brass for that very purpose. The initial plan was that for a period of 18 months old and new currencies would operate in unison – shoppers could pay in pounds shilling and pence and receive new money as change – by as early as August 1971 though, the old halfpenny, penny and the thruppenny bit had been removed from circulation, thus joining the halfcrown that had gone the same route on January 1, 1970.
The 5 and 10 new pence coins and the older shillings and florins (2 shillings) continued to circulate after decimalisation until the size of the coins were reduced in 1990 and 1991, the old 10p and florin eventually demonetised at the end of June 1993 – the sixpence (crooked or otherwise) had continued until is was withdraw at the end of June 1980, the little silver tanner having been first minted in 1551, during the reign of Edward VI.
Two years later the term ‘New Penny” was dropped as after ten years is was no longer ‘new’ – that same year seeing the introduction of the 20p coin which proved to be a popular edition to the decimalisation move that had worried many only 11 years earlier, but in truth, very quickly and easily had been embraced by the nation as a whole.