Won’t hold runner back from completing Round The Bays
Julian Beckham won’t sit around moping after more than a year of treatment, writes
Julian Beckham woke up, collapsed on the floor of his Auckland home, unable to speak, so confused he couldn’t even remember how to unlock his phone.
It was hours later at Middlemore Hospital that he started to knit together words and sentences and told medical staff his name and address. And it would be six months before the true cause of his seizure would be known – after rafts of tests, the now 36-year-old was told he had a brain tumour.
‘‘It literally turned my whole life upside down,’’ he says.
‘‘None of the scans I’ve had done showed any indication that there was something there.’’
A fit man who regularly took part in endurance races, he couldn’t shake the feeling of fatigue, so he insisted on getting an MRI scan which showed a mass on his brain.
Doctors told him it was slowgrowing, and with hospitals overrun with Covid patients and only urgent surgeries being done, Beckham found his quality of life diminishing. ‘‘They said it was benign and low-grade, and nothing to worry about: ‘We’ll monitor it’. I have always been active: I did the XTerra series and a lot of trail running. But it got to the point I was almost bedridden with fatigue. I even had to give up work.’’
Specialists gave him three options – do nothing and see if the tumour grew, have a biopsy
to determine next steps, or undergo surgery to remove the mass. However even a biopsy was likely to take months due to wait lists and the pandemic.
‘‘I opted for private because I wasn’t sure how long I was going to wait to be seen. I had surgery two weeks later, they did a full debulking resection. They took out most of it, sent it away for analysis and that’s when I found out that I had a grade 3 brain cancer. So my whole life turned upside down even further.’’
Beckham was forced to give up his work as an electrician and
now works in admin. He has endured more than a year of treatment; his most recent was three cycles of chemotherapy just before Christmas.
‘‘There are the side effects of having the cancer in my head – vomiting and fatigue, but I don’t want to sit around moping.’’
That’s why Beckham signed up for next weekend’s Southern Cross Round the Bays, being held in Auckland. The father of a one-year-old is slowly working up the physical strength to run the full 8.4km. ‘‘I want to show that people who suffer from this can still live an active and healthy lifestyle so participating in Round the Bays is something personal.’’
And he is raising money for the Cancer Society, a way to give back to the charity that helped him with counselling sessions during the early stages of treatment. He’s lost his life savings paying for his own surgery and could use the money himself, but says, ‘‘what goes around comes around’’.