Yahoo Sports At 34, Jon has incurable bowel cancer – all because the NHS turned into a Covid-only service
In the spring of 2020, Jon Chapple and a friend were debating lockdown. Jon was pretty vehement. He said he thought it was obvious that shutting down the country, and effectively making the NHS a Covid-only service, was a huge error. It would kill more people than it saved in the long run, Jon told his friend. What Jon didn’t know was that one of the people lockdown would condemn to death would be him.
How could he possibly have known? Jon was 32, a music journalist turned PR who had recently married Nikki, his childhood sweetheart. They grew up two streets away from each other in Essex. The couple were incredibly happy, planning to move into a bigger place, start a family; life was sweet, apart from an annoying stomach complaint Jon had seen the GP about in January.
He’d been referred for a colonoscopy that was supposed to happen in March, but lockdown kiboshed that. The appointment was pushed back until August when a benign polyp was discovered in Jon’s bowel. The consultant said he didn’t have the right tool to take it out (he didn’t mention it was because the growth was so large) but he told Jon he’d get him back in to do it. “It was no big deal, I thought,” recalls Jon.
There came a second lockdown, and more restrictions again. Jon would periodically get a letter through the post “from one or two private companies which the NHS had clearly sub-contracted to deal with that kind of thing”. The letters basically said, “Things are difficult at this time, we are busy, but don’t worry, we haven’t forgotten you.”
Jon’s symptoms gradually got worse. He spent a lot of time on the phone to the hospital pestering them, asking when he could have his polyp removed. Months passed; still no appointment.
He trusted the NHS. “That was a mistake. I thought if there was any chance it could be serious the doctors wouldn’t leave me hanging on for so long.” But he did start to worry. There was bleeding, a lot of pain. Eventually, Jon got his appointment to remove the polyp in December 2021. But the surgeon who opened him up didn’t remove the polyp because the polyp had disappeared inside a malevolent mass.
Jon was diagnosed with bowel cancer, which had spread to the liver, after “two years of wrong diagnoses, delayed appointments and missed opportunities to deal with the disease before it metastasised”. Nikki was with him when a doctor basically told him he wasn’t going to live.
In February 2022, he had radiotherapy, then chemotherapy. In July, they took away part of his liver. It seemed to have worked, but the cancer grew back within a couple of months. The hospital told Jon he could keep going with chemo until it stopped working, but otherwise they could do no more for him.
“To be honest, I was made to feel that it would be easier for them if I just went away and curled up in a corner and died.” That’s what must have happened with the alarming surge of excess deaths in the home we are seeing now, Jon believes. Thousands and thousands of people like him, cruelly denied medical care during lockdown, who quietly gave up and died. But Jon refused to go gentle into that good night. He was angry. “That’s probably the main emotion that’s keeping me going and that sort of bloody mindedness to just keep persevering because it’s not my fault I’m in this mess. It is someone else’s fault and I think the NHS has a responsibility to do something about it.”
Covid posed no risk to Jon. It was the response to Covid, which he believes protected the elderly at the expense of younger people like him, which caused his tragedy.
His case is absolutely dreadful, but far from unique. Since lockdown, it’s estimated that 210,000 patients with cancer have had to wait too long for their treatment.
Unbelievably, things are getting worse not better. The latest figures show cancer waiting times are the worst on record, with half of patients waiting more than the targeted 62 days to start treatment. Professor Pat Price, one of the UK’s leading oncologists who co-founded the Catchup With Cancer campaign to deal with the backlog caused by the pandemic, tells me, “We are truly in the mother of all cancer crises. I could never have imagined things would get as bad.”
For every four-week delay in diagnosis and treatment of cancer, there can be around a 10 per cent increase in the risk of death. With nearly one in two British patients not receiving life-saving treatment within the 62-day target window, that’s a national scandal. Think how long Jon Chapple waited. And Jon was articulate, determined and did all the legwork himself.
The NHS target for tackling the backlog has slipped from March 2021 to March 2024 and there is still no plan to increase treatment capacity to get through it. There is a huge crisis in radiotherapy, our second most effective cancer treatment and the most cost-effective one that is needed in 4 out of 10 cures. Yet it barely gets a mention in the Prime Minister’s plans to bring down waiting lists.
God, I get so sick of writing about this. Sorry, everyone, for repeating myself, but I simply cannot believe that our Government, and senior NHS officials are happy to stick their fingers in their ears while literally thousands of people suffer avoidable deaths. Jon should not be terminally ill. The NHS failed him because it became a Covid-only service, just as he predicted, and it continues to fail thousands of others because the cancer crisis is just too hard or too shaming.
Jon is now crowdfunding to have a revolutionary cancer vaccine in Germany. He heard about it from another lockdown victim he met at chemo – a woman in her late thirties with young children, also denied treatment for two years, also with terminal, stage four cancer.
The cost was exorbitant but the dendritic cell therapy (it helps an individual’s immune system recognise and attack their own rogue cells) has had impressive results. However it is not available on the NHS, nor even in the UK.
A proud person, Jon was embarrassed to be “passing the begging bowl around”, but what choice did he have left?
Jon is now, he says, dependent on “the kindness of strangers”. And what kindness; over £70,000 of the target £75,000 raised already for his treatment. “I refuse to accept this is the only life I have left,” he says. But why should Jon have to buy himself time when the cost has already been so very very high?
If you would like to help fund Jon’s treatment, visit gofundme.com/f/jon-access-lifesaving-cancer-treatment.
You can listen to Allison Pearson’s interview with Jon on the Planet Normal podcast on Thursday morning.
