Rob Ford facing health setback
Doug Ford says Councillor Rob Ford will soon update the public on a cancer setback, five months after surgeons removed his potentially fatal abdominal tumour.
“He’s had a little bump in the road but nothing that we can’t get over, and I’m sure Rob will be talking about it in the next day or so,” Doug Ford told radio station AM640 on Tuesday. Asked whether the cancer was the setback, Doug Ford replied, “Yes, absolutely.”
“It’s a hurdle, but we’ll get over this hurdle. He was telling me all the terrible things (Mayor) John Tory’s done over the last year and all the great things (Rob Ford) did in his first year, so he still has (fire) in his belly.”
Rob is a fighter, Doug said, “and we appreciate all the thoughts and all the prayers that come our way every day — and just keep them coming, because we need them.”
Earlier, Doug Ford told the Star his family needed time to talk to “the hospital” before publicly updating his brother’s condition, adding that the famously tight-knit Ford clan was rallying around the former mayor. Rob Ford was diagnosed in September 2014 with pleomorphic liposarcoma, a rare and aggressive cancer of connective tissues.
He was forced to abandon an uphill mayoral re-election bid, but Ward 2 Etobicoke North voters returned him to the council seat he had held for a decade before his scandal-filled mayoral term.
After months of chemotherapy and radiation, Ford underwent a 10-hour operation at Mount Sinai Hospital on May 11. His aide, Dan Jacobs, told reporters that doctors deemed the removal of a 5-centimetre tumour a success.
The five-year survival rate for pleomorphic liposarcoma is 56 per cent, according to the Liddy Shriver Sarcoma Initiative, based in Ossining, N.Y. The rate drops to 39 per cent at the 10-year mark.
Last fall Dr. Walter Longo, chief of gastrointestinal surgery at Yale University, told the Star, of someone in Ford’s position, “If they can get all the disease out surgically . . . he’ll have about a 50/50 chance of beating it.”
Ford returned to work, including city council and committee meetings, in the summer after his office said doctors were so pleased with his recovery that he could start back before the originally scheduled September date.