By Conor Sharkey
WHILE a Sinn Féin delegation made its way to Stormont yesterday (Wednesday) to plead for enhanced cancer resources for the North West, one local family spoke of their own very personal journey.
In March this year, Strabane man Danny Molloy (52) was told he had incurable cancer of the stomach.
It was a bitter blow to the popular former council employee and once keen footballer.
Since being diagnosed with the disease, Danny has been making the round trip to Belfast once every three weeks, to receive energy-sapping bouts of chaemotherapy. While his treatment has finished at present, another endless cycle of travelling and treatment is only months away.
And due to the type of treatment he requires, Danny's hospital visits aren't simply a nip over the Glenshane and home again. They are 48 hours of gruelling labour at a time, beginning at dawn on a Monday morning and ending well into a Tuesday night.
The stress this puts on himself and his family is enormous, and one that could be avoided with the establishment of a treatment centre in the North West, he said.
Speaking to the Strabane Chronicle on Tuesday, Danny explained the difficulties regularly faced by cancer patients across the Strabane District.
"I can drive, but when you are undergoing chaemotherapy, you are totally listless and have very little energy, so driving to and from Belfast myself is out of the question. I always have to rely on a family member, usually my brother or brother-in-law to take up me one day and collect me the next. You hate asking because it means they have to take two days off their work, but I don't have any option," Danny explained.
Outlining the treatment he receives, he said: "My Monday starts at about 5am because I have to be up in the Belfast cancer unit before 9am. Then they take my blood samples and send them off for testing. Normally the results come back about 1pm and if they are clear, I have to wait until a bed becomes available. Then it's on to ten hours of treatment, which usually start at 6pm and go right through until the next morning. After that I have to wait for my lift and it's the long journey back to Strabane. It is a very draining process," he explained.
As for what difference having the treatment he needs available closer to home would mean to himself and thousands like him, Danny said: "It would make a world of difference because you could be in and out in a day. It would mean only a short journey up the road and it would take a lot of stress off us all.
"According to doctors I have spoken to, one in three people will experience cancer at some point in their lives, so I would imagine there are a lot of people from Strabane, Derry, Donegal, right across the North West in the same boat as myself. I would be 100 per-cent behind what Sinn Fein are pushing for and it would make so much difference to so many families. From my perspective at present, it just feels like the regular journeys to Belfast are going to be never-ending," he said.
Meanwhile, Danny's wife Anne said she worries from the minute her husband leaves her side.
"I hate it when he has to go to Belfast because all you can do is phone him. If he was down the road in Altnagelvin, myself or his friends could pop down and see him but with Danny being in Belfast, it's terrible. We all worry away about him and I know it would be a great boost to his morale and his health if the family could be with him all the time, but we simply can't. He is so isolated up there and I hate thinking about what he is going through. It would be fantastic to have him treated closer to home," Anne said.
