Video: Notts Tonight’s John van Geest 1in2 Day Special which aired on Friday (Febraury 24)
Thousands of Nottingham people helped to raise money on 1in2 Day on Friday (February 24) to help crack cancer, including mini Olympic games, triathlon challenges and cake sales.
1in2 Day is an annual fundraiser set to raise money for the John van Geest Centre who are researching how to beat cancer.
Fundraisers named 1in2 Day after the ratio of people who will be diagnosed with the disease at some point in their lifetimes.
The latest development for the centre has seen them create prostate cancer cells to work out how they spread around the body.
Louise Third had breast cancer and shared the story of her experience on Notts Tonight’s John van Geest 1in2 Day special.
She said: “It was picked up very early so my prognosis was very positive and it came as a surprise but through the mammogram programme, it was found.
“I therefore went forward for treatment at that time and it took about six months from start to finish.
“I had fairly simple surgery but then they discovered that my cancer would be potentially fast growing so I had to have six cycles of chemotherapy and 15 of radiotherapy; I’m now on tamoxifen for 10 years so it’s quite brutal.”
Louise said that her family and friends managed to ‘keep her positive’ throughout her treatment.
She said: “I’m a naturally positive woman because I run my own company and I just kept working and that’s not a bad thing to do when you’ve got the energy to do it.
“My family and friends were fabulous, they hid their concerns well and I had lots of ways of keeping myself energised.
“By the end of six months though I realised how tired I was and what it had taken out of me, especially as it has taken two years to get back to the state that I was.”
Unfortunately not everyone is as lucky and the cancer for some can be terminal.
Greater Nottingham Cancer Forum member Frankie Price shared the story of her husband who died from cancer.
She said: “My late husband worked in cancer research and sadly he died in 2000 from it.
“He was not only instrumental in the research but was also passionate about making sure it was translated into practice in hospitals.
“Cancer has an enormous impact on people’s lives and we were particularly unlucky because the cancer that my husband Mike contracted was a very rare one.
“There was no successful treatment for it and we were told from the outset that he would die which was very hard to live with and very hard to live with no hope.”
Frankie says that cancer treatment and understanding of it is improving.
She said: “A lot of people now live with cancer rather than die from it, like prostate cancer and breast cancer and the survival rates are much better than they used to be.
“Funding has always been an issue for cancer research and when my husband died, in the last week of his life, he had a meeting with his staff to get together funding for the following year because it was very much a hand-to-mouth existence.
“Funding was only given to a specific project and the scientists have to demonstrate results in order to continue to get funding towards that which really curtails the freedom of a scientist to pursue some lines of research which could prove fruitful.”
“From what I understand, the research at the John van Geest Centre is really exciting; they’re taking about vaccinations against it in the future, about simple treatments to reverse the abhorrent way in which the immune system is working.
“If that comes to fruition, it will dramatically change diagnosis and prognosis of cancer in the future.”
For more on this year’s 1in2 Day, be sure to see how the day unfolded on our live blog.
Last year saw the first public 1in2 Day take place, where a giant hokey cokey in the city, an exercise bike marathon and fancy dress events were just a few of the eye-catching events.
