Not Giving Up..
WHEN the doctor asked 'Mr Charity' Gerard Ee to sit down, he knew the news about his colon check was not good.
'I told the doctor I'd watched enough movies to know that when the doc says take a seat, it's bad news,' recalled Mr Ee yesterday. 'I told him: 'Don't waste my time, tell me what the outcome is.''
The doctor replied: Stage 3 colon cancer, with a tumour almost as big as a tennis ball.
Patients at this stage of colon cancer are said to have a 40 per cent survival rate on average. 'If the cancer was Stage 4, I'd be a goner,' said Mr Ee.
For the veteran volunteer and charity personality, this marked the beginning of a period of contemplating the possibility of death and what it would mean for those around him, especially his wife and teenage children.
Almost a year since that day in the doctor's clinic, the 59-year-old came out in public yesterday to share the story of his fight against the dreaded Big C.
He did so to show his support for a campaign by the Lien Foundation to get people talking more openly about death and dying.
The campaign coincides with the Government's move to promote the Advance Medical Directive, a legal document to instruct doctors not to take extraordinary measures to prolong life if one is terminally ill or unconscious. The Lien Foundation's chairman, Mrs Margaret Lien, said of the campaign: 'A lot of unnecessary burden and pain can be avoided if we can talk about end-of-life matters openly.'
For Mr Ee, a retired accountant who is currently chairman of the National Kidney Foundation (NKF) and Public Transport Council, the past year has meant undergoing surgery to remove the tumour and 12 sessions of chemotherapy.
The good news is that he is now 'in the clear' since finishing his last round of chemotherapy in June.
Looking back, he said what helped him through the year was his faith in God, a sense of humour and the fact that he had put his finances in order. The devout Catholic said: 'People were surprised I was so calm throughout the whole thing. I think if I didn't have a strong faith in God, I would have been in a panic.'
His calmness helped his wife, 15-year-old son and 13-year-old daughter to accept the diagnosis as well.
'I tried to avoid using dramatic words like 'tumour' when I broke the news to my family,' he said. 'I said: 'I have a growth that needs to be operated on.' I knew that if I was hysterical about it, it would have had a chain effect on others.'
Mr Ee was hard-pressed to answer when asked what proved most difficult for him in facing up to cancer. But he confessed to being worried before the surgery to remove his tumour.
'There are only two outcomes: you wake up, or you don't,' he said. 'If you don't wake up, that's the end of the story and my will and life insurance would take care of what happens after that.
'But if you wake up, you have to figure out what to do after that.'
He woke up. And what he did after that was work to keep his spirits up.
He had a rule for his family: No one was allowed to treat him like an invalid.
So he drove himself to chemotherapy sessions and, within two weeks of the operation, was back to performing a host of volunteer commitments.
The surgery involved removing a part of his small intestine, over half a metre of large intestine and his appendix as well. Over the whole process, he also lost 25kg.
'Having a sense of humour is important. I told my friends I had a free liposuction with the operation,' he said.
After keeping his illness private for a year, the Lien Foundation campaign gave Mr Ee a chance to share what he had gone through.
He thinks it is important to get people to prepare for death. Among other things, their families may suffer if they fail to settle their finances before they go.
He said: 'The only thing in life you can guarantee, and nowadays people talk about guarantees, is death.
'If you treat death as taboo and don't prepare for it, you are leaving behind a legacy in which your family will suffer because you ignore it and pretend it won't happen to you.'
theresat@sph.com.sg
13Nov08, ST
