Terminally-ill Ben facing anxious wait after kind strangers fund ‘final holiday wish’
PASSPORT ISSUE THREATENS TURKEY TRIP
A TERMINALLY-ill Derbyshire man has managed to book a holiday with his girlfriend as his “final wish” as members of the public raised more than £1,000.
Ben Roberts, from Barlborough, was diagnosed with cancer almost five years ago and has been told by doctors he has just months to live since his treatment stopped working.
The 21-year-old, who lives with his girlfriend, Sydney Benn, 19, and their American bull terrier named Missy, is currently weighing up whether to start a new experimental treatment a final chance to prolong his life.
Ben had told his doctor his dream was to go away abroad “before he gets poorly”. The doctor told him his only chance was to get away before Christmas.
Sydney started up a GoFundMe page last week to raise funds for the trip and since then, £1,083 has been raised by almost 50 donations.
Ben said: “I think I had just turned 17 and I noticed a lump on my left leg, just below the knee and I just thought I had banged my leg or something. I noticed that the lump had started to grow so I thought that I will go to the hospital just to get it checked over.
“Eight to nine weeks later, the lump had grown and it started to go purple, and to touch it, it was boiling hot.”
Ben was sent to the hospital again, where he was sent for an ultrasound scan followed by an emergency MRI.
He said: “A couple of weeks later, I got the call to say that it was cancer, but that it was operable.”
Still a teenager, Ben began 30 rounds of radiotherapy over the course of a month and under went surgery to remove the cancer from his left leg.
He says: “It shrunk almost all of the cancer, the only bit that it didn’t was around the nerve and so they told me I had the option between amputation or remove the nerve.”
He chose the latter which left him unable to lift his foot without a leg brace.
He said: “At the time I was 17 years old so it was better than amputation so that was the operation that I went for.”
Ben says doctors removed muscle from his left leg and grafted muscle from his back to replace it. Doctors told Ben the surgery was successful and the cancer had been removed.
Ben said: “I was told that it might return in my thirties and I thought that obviously, that is a long time away.
“But I stopped smoking because of
it, because they said that could contribute to it and so I stopped everything, seven months later, on my follow-up scans, they noticed that it had come back in the leg again.
“My lungs lit up as well and my brain lit up. They cleared my brain and told me ‘I just have a very active brain.’
“I went back on March 5, 2018, to see another consultant and he told me that it wasn’t curable and that I have 12 to 18 months to live.”
Ben started chemotherapy and said he has lost count of the number of sessions that he had over the following six to nine months.
He said: “It worked tremendously, I was in remission in my lungs and in the leg it had shrunk loads too and they said that I didn’t have to have treatment for another year.
“But they noticed in my lungs it had come back again and in the left leg, but up in the groin this time, and so it was a little further up the leg.
“It was like, it is always going to come back but it is just keeping it at bay now.”
The chemotherapy worked again in Ben’s lungs, but failed to work, even with additional radiotherapy, on his leg.
“It was six to seven months ago, I had a scan and they told me that the cancer in my lungs had spread and there were a lot more spots in my lung that had appeared. And, in the groin that had grown quite a bit.
“They put me on this treatment and they said that ‘you will be on this treatment for the rest of your life, but it is the only good option you have got left’ basically.
“Every three weeks you can have the treatment, and you can have it as long as it works.”
Ben was started on the strongest form of the treatment, having never had a bad reaction to chemotherapy before.
However, this treatment made Ben really unwell.
He said: “The third time I went on that treatment it put me into kidney failure and liver failure and I was in hospital for ten days.”
The experience left Ben needing a wheelchair immediately after the incident and he now has a pronounced limp. He continued the treatment on a lower dose.
Ben said: “I had my scan and that’s when they said to me the chemotherapy had stopped working. A lot more spots had grown and the spots that were already there had got bigger.
“I was quite straight forward with the consultant and said to him ‘Look, realistically, how long have I got left to live with nothing?’ and he said ‘I expect you to fall ill within three months and it could be earlier.’
“He said there are these trials that I can go on in Manchester or London but it would be a very big commitment and it is obviously not guaranteed to work.
“I’m not 100 per cent sure whether I am going to do it because I am giving up my life basically to do this treatment.”
Ben is hoping to make the final decision on whether he begins the experimental treatment on holiday with Sydney and the pair, who have been together for three years, have booked a trip to Turkey which is set to depart on Thursday.
The couple are due to return on Sunday, 19 December where they are planning to be cleared by a PCR test to spend Christmas with close family.
However, Ben has had difficulties with the Home Office issuing him a new passport in time for the trip after only being advised by his doctor that he should make plans to get away before Christmas last week.
Ben is worried they will need to give away the holiday to a friend and he will miss out on a final break.
Speaking about the response to the amount of money raised for the trip, Ben said: “I never really wanted to do the GoFundMe but because the consultant said to me, ‘If you want to go away then it has to be this side of
Christmas.’ There was no way I could get the funds to pay for the holiday myself.
“It’s not an embarrassing thing, but it is a pride thing as a man, but I have got to put that to the side because I really do want to go away, it is the last thing that I want to do.
“I am so grateful for people who have just taken the time to read a little bit about my story, never mind donating. I can’t say how thankful I am because, if I can get away, they have made my last wish come true.
“It is nice to get it finally off my chest because people I know never even knew my story and never even knew I had cancer and I have had it for five years now.
“The response I have received has made it easier for me to open up about it and it gave me confidence because I always thought I would get judged so I was always scared to open up and tell people.
“I am so grateful that I am able to open up about it now.”
Ben and Sydney are still accepting donations on their GoFundMe campaign in anticipation that they will be able to make it to Turkey.
The Derby Telegraph has contacted the Home Office and passed on Ben’s details.
The Home Office said that they would look into the case.