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‘Cancer couldn’t stop me reaching the North Pole’
When a medical check-up produced devastating results, Chris Harrop refused to let it get in the way of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. By Tom Ough
It started with bruises. Bruises as big as saucers, as long as a forearm. Chris Harrop lived healthily, though, and was sometimes clumsy. He travelled a lot. Maybe he’d just bumped into things. Maybe those enormous, colourful bruises were the result of bumping into train seats as the carriage swayed.
Then again, he was thinner and more tired than usual, and the bruises took a long time to clear up. Months, in fact. One of them was there for a year. Since Harrop was planning a once-in-alifetime expedition to the North Pole, his wife, Jo, told him he’d better get a check-up. The day after the medical, Harrop was waiting for a train at Glasgow Central Station when his phone rang. It was the doctor.
“I assumed it would be fine because it was the day after the medical,” says Harrop. “My BMI was fine. Everything else was all right. And he said, ‘There’s an issue with your results. We need you to see a haematologist urgently.’ And that was that. That was the start.”
Harrop wouldn’t let the doctor off the phone until he had more information. “I managed to wheedle out from him that it was some form of blood cancer.” He began the lonely three-hour train journey back home to Sale, Greater Manchester, and broke the news to Jo and their two daughters, Madeline and Bethan.
That phone call was on Nov 26 2014. Three weeks later, Harrop was given his official diagnosis. It was chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML), a rare type of blood cancer that causes bone marrow to produce abnormal white blood cells. It develops more slowly than acute myeloid leukaemia, but it is similarly serious; 30 per cent of men and 25 per cent of women die within five years of diagnosis. Harrop had bad luck in contracting it before his 60s, the decade in which it is most likely to strike.
Unlike normal white blood cells, the abnormal versions produced by people with CML – myeloid cells – do not protect the body from infection. As the cancer slowly progresses, it creates various additional problems, such as causing the body to produce too many platelets – hence Harrop’s bruises.
Harrop was given further tests and treatment, but the drugs caused side effects of their own. “The thing about CML is that, because it’s treatable but incurable, it definitely messes with the head. And despite what they say about the drugs, the side effects can really affect you in terms of pain and fatigue. Mentally, it’s a real challenge, because you’re dependent on the dose of the drug you’re on. It really slows you down due to the fatigue. And I was very active, business-wise and socially.”
Despite the fatigue, Harrop stayed active. “You could take the diagnosis and then sit in front of the TV and get worse and worse. But I’ve definitely found that the less you do, the more the fatigue and the bone pain hits you.”
Harrop is a busy man. Along with his job as director of sustainability at a landscaping company, he was also a director of the Ethical Trading Initiative and the chair of the UN Global Compact in the UK. He took three months off and, with regret, accepted he couldn’t ski to the North Pole. The trip, run by an adventure company, went without him.
But maybe there was another way. After all, Harrop was desperate to see the pole. He had been training for years, having completed a Ray Mears Arctic survival course in the far north of Sweden and a Nordic skiing course in Norway. And given his methodical, goal-orientated mind, the prospect of reaching the pole was too tantalising for him to forget about it.
There was another way: taking a Russian helicopter from Barneo Ice Camp, a base that caters to the tourist industry, two years after the original trip. Harrop couldn’t resist. His doctor gave permission, warning Harrop to keep his chemotherapy drugs in his armpit, lest they freeze in the -39C (-38F) cold. Desperate to see the pole, offered passage by the adventure company, and determined to raise some sponsorship money for Leukaemia Care, one of the three charities supported by the Telegraph’s Christmas Charity Appeal, Harrop embarked on the three-day journey on April 10 2017. Jo was at home, in Sale, waiting for the satellite call that Harrop had promised to make once he’d reached the pole. “It was the Easter holidays,” she remembers. I’m sitting at their dinner table in the same room that she’d anxiously waited. “I paced up and down, thinking: ‘Just make it. And let it be brilliant. Let it be everything you want it to be – and then get home as quickly as possible, and be warm, and be safe.”
He made it. He put a Leukaemia Care flag in the ice, stuffed some of the ice in some vials by way of a souvenir, and was ushered back to the tent. “It was just about as good as I wanted it to be,” Harrop says, smiling at the memory.
He’s at the table, too, looking healthy and happy. “I’m still the only person to have reached the North Pole who had his leukaemia chemo with him.”
Jo, a teaching assistant, explains what she’s learnt about her husband. “He’s much more stubborn than I ever thought. When the bone pain strikes, you just want to say, ‘Sit down and stop!’, but because he is so resilient he tends not to want to, despite the evidence that sometimes resting is the best medicine. But that’s not Chris. That hasn’t got him to where he is.”
By that, Jo means not only his achievement in reaching the pole, but the OBE he was awarded in the 2019 New Year’s Honours List, for his services to the prevention of modern slavery and exploitation. Their trip to Buckingham Palace was another high point amid the troubles of managing Harrop’s condition. The Duke of Cambridge
‘I’m the only person to reach the North Pole who had his leukaemia chemo with him’
presented the medal, and asked Harrop about his work. It was a proud day. The honour, says Harrop, “proved to me I’ve been able to carry on and still achieve, despite the leukaemia.”
He praises Leukaemia Care, which provides practical support for individuals and families. “The temptation to google your illness is very high, and you could scare yourself silly. The one thing I was determined to do was, if I was going to read anything online it would be from a credible organisation, not some strange people selling yak urine as the cure for everything. That’s how I found Leukaemia Care.”
His polar expedition raised £7,500 for the charity. Reaching that figure, Harrop says, was another proud moment in a period of great adversity. He shows me some polar water, encased in its vial as if it were a small bottle of gin; he shows me the OBE medal, and the thick coat in which he reached the pole. It would be quite a haul for anyone, leukaemia or no. “That’s my story,” he says. “Still going. Still lots to do.”
Leukaemia Care is one of three charities supported by this year’s Telegraph Christmas Appeal. The others are Wooden Spoon, which works with the rugby community to raise money for disabled and disadvantaged children, and The Silver Line, a telephone support service for lonely elderly people. To donate, see the form below, visit telegraph.co.uk/ charity or call 0151 284 1927 before the end of January