One of the co-founders of opposition Progress Singapore Party, Anthony Lee, shares his journey battling terminal cancer, a divorce, and his daughter’s severe drug allergy simultaneously.
The news of being a cancer patient was a surprise for Mr Lee, who said it started with a tiny lump on his face.
He noted it was an incidental finding while at the hospital for a different reason.
A month later, he discovered that his then-wife was pregnant. “So it was a whirlwind, having cancer and the child that was coming into this world.”
He had surgery in September 2013 to prepare for their child’s arrival.
Fast forward to 2020, Mr Lee began experiencing abdominal pain. He noted that it was persistent, affecting his eating habits and making him bloat.
He visited the General Practitioner several times and was told he had gastrointestinal issues. They began treating it as such, only to suffer from tremendous pain in May 2020.
Despite being given painkillers at the GP, the abdominal pain didn’t subside but got worse.
He went back to the clinic and was advised to visit the hospital. By then, Mr Lee was suffering from excruciating pain and had to call an ambulance.
He was conveyed to National University Hospital, but doctors couldn’t decipher the cause of the pain, so he was warded for further testing.
“I was slipping into unconsciousness, and the last few things I heard with a blurry vision was doctors saying, ‘He doesn’t look good.’”
After a CT scan, Mr Lee was diagnosed with severe acute pancreatitis.
“But at that very point of time, they did not spot any signs of cancer that sort of triggered the alarm.”
Upon discharge, Mr Lee gradually lost weight and went through periods of diarrhoea.
His daughter also nearly died after a severe drug allergy from a treatment. “She suffered from Stevens-Johnsons syndrome where she was blistered from head to toe, and we nearly lost her.”
At the same time, Mr Lee was going through a divorce. He cited a tremendous amount of stress during that time.
During a follow-up checkup, his doctor said “something was not right” with his present condition of diarrhoea and weight loss.
He later discovered he had cancer based on the CT scan. His oncologist added that without the scan, nobody would have imagined he had cancer.
He asked for the stage, pressing the doctor to be frank. “Is it stage four?” asked Mr Lee, to which the doctor nodded.
“Being a stage four (cancer patient), you literally have no chance of survival. Pancreatic cancer is very deadly; it’s effectively the deadliest cancer in the world,” he added.
Even with multiple doctor opinions, Mr Lee was advised to be as comfortable as possible. “They could only wish me luck.”
“Knowing my own financial situation and things like that, I knew treatment in the US was out of reach.”
He participated in any local clinical trial offered to him to make the most of his situation and use his condition for research purposes.
At one point, he was the only patient participating in a ten-hour chemotherapy session.
“When you are six months to a year, you might not really know how to respond. Because I didn’t. I was trying to compute six months to a year.”
“This is what I have left. Was this something that I had to start planning for in terms of my own funeral, the time that I had left with my little girl?”
Mr Lee highlighted there was no straight-cut formula in dealing with such things because it’s very personal.
He created a bucket list, and one of the things he planned were video logs where he left words of encouragement for his daughter in advance.
Mr Lee admitted he wanted to live on for his daughter, noting he waited ten years before he was blessed with a child.
He hoped that fellow cancer patients and their loved ones would also have this perseverance and energy to fight.
“Don’t give up on fighting cancer. There’s no reason why we should have our lives dictated by the condition,” said Mr Lee, who has been going strong for over a year and a half since his diagnosis.
He used himself as an example when his hair grew back after chemotherapy. When people see me right now, they don’t think I’m a terminal cancer patient. It’s all about the mindset and the will to live,” he added./TISG