Laughter in the face of a killer
IT should have been the day Gareth Dunn’s dream of being an Army officer started to come true.
But instead of beginning training at Sandhurst Academy he was diagnosed with cancer.
His future was snatched from him and his life in tatters. Yet the 25-year-old, given just a year to live, has found a remarkable way of coping with the killer.
He has become a globally successful online comedian whose blog, Chemotionally Unstable, has 70,000 fans.
He describes his chemo machine as a curvy little number, says he takes more drugs than all the characters in Trainspotting and reveals his prosthetic leg is the perfect size to hold a pint.
He said: “I can bury my head in the sand and count down my final days or crack on and enjoy every minute of what I have left.”
Gareth, who pretends to kids he is a robot because of his metal leg, jokingly questions whether he was doomed because he laughed at controversial comic Frankie Boyle or for lying to his mum that his brother had punched him when he was six. Gareth was first diagnosed in January 2015. He had niggling pain in his left foot and swelling “the size of a small African country” while training to prepare for Sandhurst.
He had it checked and minutes into the journey to the Academy a specialist phoned to ask him to come to hospital to discuss his results.
Gareth thought it could be easily rectified. But an hour later a specialist told him he had a malignant stage-three tumour in his left foot and had to have a below-the-knee amputation.
Gorilla
He said: “It was more than a bombshell. But I still assumed it would be OK and I could just delay starting at Sandhurst.” But it was not to be. He said: “That meant the end of my Army officer career, on the day I officially started my training. Yet instead of being destroyed by cancer, Gareth, 25, developed a jokey relationship with his medical equipment. He nicknamed his IV tube, the one pumping the chemotherapy into his body, IVy. He said she was “everything James Blunt has ever sung about, beautiful, curvy, she’s got a mind of her own. She’s hooked on me, she sets my heart on fire, she follows me everywhere I go. “Her name’s IVy, and she has enough bite to drop a 400lb gorilla.” Three months after s urgery, superfit Gareth was fitted with a prosthetic running blade. He went on to successfully apply to train with the cycling, canoeing and athletics squad of the GB paralympic team. But two years after his initial diagnosis, and after he passed the Foreign Office entrance exams, a routine scan revealed his cancer was terminal. He is now trying to raise £100,000 for Cancer Research UK. He has already made £ 30,000. In the spring he will cycle from his home in Leeds to Istanbul in Turkey with his brother Rhys, an architect. Gareth said: “I may not be here for a long time but I’m going to make that time matter.”