When you're told you have cancer, it changes everything

THE first thing Larry Tompkins will tell you is that it started small.

- BY GARRY DOYLE

Just a niggle. A tiny ache under the ribs — the sort of discomfort any man of his generation would shrug off with the muttered words: "It'll be grand."

Except it wasn't.

Looking back he now says: "I suppose it starts as little things.

"A little bit of a pain, annoying more than anything. I let it go — didn't see anyone for maybe nine or 10 months."

That stubbornness — the same trait that made him a legend in Cork football - nearly cost him dearly.

What followed was a long, winding road of uncertainty, misdiagnosis, and, ultimately survival.

Doctors probed. They feared the lungs were infected.

But when all the tests came back inconclusive, Larry was sent home with reassurances that never sat quite right.

He said: "I was told I was clear. But I wasn't happy with it. I knew something was wrong."

Larry pushed again. He went back. And that decision, perhaps as vital as any he ever made on a football field, revealed the truth.

A tumour. On the wall of his lung. His left lung leaking, full of fluid.

"They told me it was cancer and not just any cancer. A very rare one. One in five million, they said. I could be the only one in Ireland with it."

The words hang there.

Even now, nearly a year on from the worst of it, you can sense the disbelief in his voice.

How could someone so relentlessly driven, so physically resilient, suddenly find himself facing odds like that?

London doctors were called. Reports and scans were dispatched to the Brompton Hospital.

Surgery was considered, then ruled out — too dangerous.

"They said it would have been touch and go," he says.