'I thank my donor every morning for the chance of a life'

WHEN army veteran Dave Rees marked his 60th birthday in 2023 he and his family were grappling with the reality of his limited life expectancy following his stage four bowel cancer diagnosis.

- SHAURYA SHAURYA

During the treatment, his lungs were seriously damaged and he went from running five to six miles each day to being unable to walk even a few metres.

Five years earlier, doctors diagnosed him with an inflamed bowel. But as they could not confirm what had caused it, they booked Dave for further tests. In 2018, he was given the devastating news he had bowel cancer.

“My wife had been shopping and you can imagine her coming into a car, and I just turned around to her and said, “There's only one way I can say this, my love, I've got cancer,” Dave recalled.

“We just looked at each other and burst into tears”

When he underwent surgery to remove the cancer on Friday, April 13, 2018, medics realised he was suffering not stage two cancer, as initially thought, but from much more serious stage four cancer.

“(The operation] was about 10 hours long” said Dave, now 62, from Caerphilly. “It was actually stage four and it was coming out of my colon. So they had to remove my colon. I’ve only got small bowels now and I have a stoma that’s for life.”

Dave had another op a few months later, but said he was still “quite fit” He then underwent chemotherapy and - suffering from a pulmonary embolism as part of his treatment - he “had to have loads of drugs to thin it all out.”