Our 15-year-old son’s secret battle with blood cancer, by Miriam and Nick Clegg
NICK Clegg yesterday revealed his teenage son had been battling blood cancer.
Antonio, 15, is now free of the disease after gruelling chemotherapy sessions.
Recalling the moment his son was diagnosed, Mr Clegg said he felt an ‘irrational urge’ to try to put the illness on himself.
The former deputy PM added: ‘Just like any other parent, you’ve got your work and you’ve got all sorts of other things going on in your life.
‘But when something like this happens, it just becomes the sole principal objective, just to make sure he is better.’
He replied ‘Just a bit’ when asked on ITV’s Lorraine programme whether his son’s illness had put things into perspective.
His wife, Miriam Gonzalez Durantez, added: ‘The day Antonio was told and probably us telling him was one of the toughest things that we have ever done.’
In what she described as ‘a stroke of luck’ they took Antonio, who has two brothers, to see their GP about an innocuous lump that turned out to be Hodgkin lymphoma.
She said: ‘It was a small lump, he didn’t have any other symptoms, he didn’t have a high temperature.
‘He was playing football for hours every day so you would not have noticed.’
One minute Antonio – then 14 – was running around the garden, the next he was in
‘Why me? Have I done something wrong?’
hospital losing his hair and taking massive doses of medication.
Miss Gonzalez Durantez, 49, said: ‘ The sequence of feeling you typically have is the “Why?”. You want to understand. We don’t know why. And then you go to the, “Why me? Why my son?”.
‘And then you have the phase where you go through the guilt. “Have I done something wrong?”
‘And then you want to do something, and eventually you realise there is not much that you can do as a parent. The only thing that you can do is be there for him.’
She said the day after his diagnosis Antonio stood up in front of his classmates and told them: ‘I have cancer.’
Mr Clegg, 50, and his wife spoke out yesterday to raise awareness of the work done by Bloodwise, which carries out research into blood cancer and supports families.
In an introduction to a report released by the charity yesterday, Mr Clegg said: ‘You have no choice but to watch your own child battle through the heavy treatment, however much all your parental instincts wish you could take their place.’
The former Liberal Democrat leader, who lost his Sheffield Hallam seat at the general election, described the illness as ‘difficult to endure and painful to watch’. He and his wife said they felt a ‘spike of anxiety’ when Antonio has a health check every three months but he is now free of cancer.
Dr Alasdair Rankin, director of research at Bloodwise, said scientific funding was vital because one in five children diagnosed with the most common type of leukaemia still did not survive. He said survivors faced devastating side effects both during and after treatment.
To find out more about the charity’s work go to: bloodwise.org.uk