O-Day + 1

All in all, the last twenty four hours have gone as well as we could have hoped. Seven hours of surgery seem to have gone well and Dad had a good night, albeit with a few pain issues, which I think are now under control. He remains in intensive care, but there are already noises about moving him back to the ward, which is hugely encouraging.

Mole and the halves (George, Hugh and Alice) all came round for supper last night, which was, I think, a good move. With the added diversion of Real Madrid against Tottenham and Mole's birthday to "celebrate" we had as happy an evening as you could have expected.

Mole had been in to see Dad once he was in intensive care and was much cheered by how he seemed.....as  comfortable as could be expected and certainly looking better than she feared. I think she was, understandably, massively relieved to have got through yesterday, as we all were.
I spoke to her this morning and Hammersmith Hospital have told her that they are considering moving him out of intensive care as early as today. On the one hand, this is great news.......on the other, I just hope they don't move him too early.

Operation Day

It has been a conscious effort on everyone's part for life to go on much as normal over the past month. Since we knew when Dad's op was going to be it has simply been a case of crossing fingers that he remains healthy and bug free so that the operation can go ahead.

Today is the day. He went in first thing this morning and was first on the theatre list. Mole and the halves took him in, which I think was, not surprisingly, very difficult. As I expected, Mole has been very stoic over the past month, as has the old boy, but I think leaving him this morning was very difficult for her.

As I mentioned earlier, Dad is an old fashioned, stiff upper lip character who is not known to wear his heart on his sleeve. I had my last conversation before the op with him yesterday afternoon which was, entirely predictably, exactly like so many others over the last twenty years in tone and content. We spoke about the op and he was reconciled to what he described as "necessary" and "boring", without which he would be "brown bread". I think he was very apprehensive about it and probably felt rather like that feeling of dread that you used to get as a child when going back to boarding school. You don't want to go, but you know you have to.

I sent Mole a text just before 7 this morning (when they were arriving at the hospital) asking her to give him a hug from me. I know that, at least on the surface, he wouldn't approve, but I hope that he appreciated it. Mole rang me when she got home and was very tearful. She has bottled up an awful lot of emotion over the past month and has done everything possible to carry on as normal, at a time when clearly things are not normal. She has been strong for Dad's sake, but she is only human and needs to let it all go from time to time. She is an emotional character........strong, but with a soft side. When she said goodbye to Dad this morning, there were tears in the eyes of both.......

In writing this I realise that I have not thought enough about Mole in the past month: carrying on as normal, insofar as possible, has been the game, but I should have checked in with her more, find out how she is, lend her an ear. I will not let it happen going forward.

D-Day + 8: Spreading the news

The main emphasis of this weekend was rest. I can't believe how tired I was on Friday. I was tucked up by 10.30 pm and did not wake up once until 10 am on Saturday morning. I think that tells its own story. Saturday was spent continuing to sort out the house (we have moved recently) and watching the racing all afternoon.......just what was needed!

Yesterday I told three of my children about Dad's condition. I was not able to tell William and will not do so until his exeat in just under two weeks time. But on the basis that there is no way for him to find out, I am relaxed.

I have to say it was easier than I expected. It is the sort of thing where you MUST be honest, both in what you say and how you answer any questions, but the key is in the tone. If you come across as emotional or upset, I suspect that that is the impression that will be left with the listener. I did not want them to be over-wrought or disturbed. I am confident that I succeeded. All are naturally concerned, but nothing more.

I did some more research into convalescent homes nearer Dad and Mole. Their appears to by an industry body/regulator called the Care Quality Commission, who inspect these establishment and write reports that are available to the public. Through their website, I discovered a place in Twickenham that sounds/looks fit for purpose, so I emailed the details to Mole.

Today sees the tour of the NHS ward at Hammersmith Hospital and the meeting with Mr Jiao for Mole, Alice and George.

D-Day + 5 : TGIF!

This is one week I am glad to see the end of! It is just before 10pm on Friday evening and I feel completely cooked! An early night beckons.......and the early morning tomorrow can be by-passed.

No major news today. The next significant event is on Monday afternoon, with the tour of the NHS facilities that Mole, George and Alice are doing and then meeting Mr Jiao, Dad's surgeon.

And I am going to tell the children this weekend (bar William). Whilst I would love to tell them all as near as makes no odds simultaneously, I can't. And given that William has no chance of accidentally finding out until he is told I am relaxed about it. I do not envisage any issues with the other three, except possibly with Lydia, who we are having lunch with on Sunday, so we will have enough time to reassure her.

D-Day + 4 : Promises, promises

Now that I think we are largely clear on the hows and wheres of Dad's surgery amd recuperation, my mind is starting to turn to how we help him in the period between now and when his treatment starts in earnest. In talking to a very good friend this evening, he made the valid point that I/he/we (Team Farquhar) should try to make best use of the time to do things together that are particularly meaningful to us/Dad.

That struck a chord with me and yet I could not help but think that for Dad, at the moment, life must feel somewhat as a relatively young, new boarder feels at the very end of the school holidays: the sense of foreboding that you know a very difficult time is coming and that somehow, it influences all aspects of how you behave and how you feel . I remember vivdly my complete lack of desire to eat lunch on the day I went back to boarding school: the butterflies in the tummy somehow would not allow it. Similarly, it didn't really matter what you did or others organised to try to take one's mind off going back, the bottom line was that I couldn't forget and the butterflies remained flying around the pit of my stomach.

So when it is suggested that we should do things together as a family, or part of family, between now and when the medical lights turn green, my hunch is that he is not interested. I gently suggested him coming to the Cheltenham National Hunt Festival for a day with me. It did not surprise me a jot that he dismissed the idea in a flash. To be fair, he has never been a fan of going to the really big race meetings. He has always been happier to watch the main races on telly from his comfortable sofa and then potter down to William Hill to watch the last couple of races there. He has done the same for Cheltenham and Royal Ascot for as long as I can remember.....a creature of habit!

Knowing him as I do, my sense is that he will be most happy pottering around at home (watching Deal or No Deal, with a bar of chocolate, a can of Coke and a packet of Silk cut all within easy reach), whilst having lots of upbeat and cheerful contact from his family between now and the commencement of hostilities against the offending tumour. If we start to behave in a manner completely out of the ordinary, or start suggesting outlandish trips that we would, in all honesty, never have contemplated in normal circumstances, I suspect it will merely serve to exacerbate his sense of discomfort about what is upcoming. Nonetheless, I shall raise the subject with him tomorrow, as my hunch/sense is not enough......I need to know how he wants to play the next few days/weeks. This is harking back to my earlier post once again. I want to answer the "what if?" question now, rather than wish at some stage down the line, possibly too late, that I had addressed it earlier.

The old boy tried to get me to make him a promise today. I have inherited his passion for racing and my favourite four days of the year is the Cheltenham National Hunt Festival. I look forward to it over the entire winter and spend the whole week there. I am among the first people onto the racecourse every day and among the last to leave every evening: in short, it helps me get through the winter. For many, it is skiing that does it; knowing that they will be on top of a sun-drenched mountain in beautiful air in mid March helps them get through the dark mornings and dark afternoons of December and January. For me, it is knowing that I will be standing on the lawn in front of the grandstand as the starter springs the tapes at the start of the Supreme Novice Hurdle, the first race on the first day. Back to the promise he wanted me to make!

We very much hope that he will be operated on at some point in the next three/four weeks. There is therefore a chance (albeit odds against!) that it may be during Cheltenham week. He wanted me to promise that I would not break my Cheltenham marathon to come back to London to be with/near him and, arguably more importantly, the rest of Team Farquhar. I was not prepared to make that promise. I told him that I wanted to retain the option to come back to London should I so wish, be it for what I perceived as my benefit, his benefit, Mole's benefit or for anyone else in Team Farquhar's benefit.

I know why he said it. He wants life, insofar as it can, to go on as normal and does not want routines to change. I understand why, but equally I recognise that, as of Diagnosis Day, my life, his life, all of our lives changed. The rule book that governed day to day life until this Monday no longer applies. So, whilst I do not expect to be in London during Cheltenham week, there is no way that I will give him a promise that I may not wish to keep, because I would rather be somewhere other than Cheltenham and be with people other than my racing fogies.

It may not be what he wanted me to say, but I hope he understood why I said it.

D-Day + 3 - Questions, questions

The last couple of days have been all about trying to establish answers to some pretty fundamental questions and I feel that we have made good progress.


The biggest question has been the NHS versus private issue. Because Dad had such a miserable time on the ward in the Charing Cross last month, we are VERY keen for him to be able to convalesce in a private room, where he will not be disturbed and be able to start his recovery in the right environment. However, given that the same surgeon would carry out the treatment at the same hospital at, give or take probably not much, around the same time and will be in the same Intensive Care Unit (ICU) irrespective of whether he goes private or NHS, it ovbiously seemed ideal to try to get stages one and two (surgery and ICU) done on the NHS and to pick up the tab and go private for stage three.


Unfortunately, this is not possible. You cannot split the whole process: it is either all private or all NHS. And having spoken with my GP, who left me in absolutely no doubt that we would be crazy to opt to go private and fund it ourselves, NHS it will be. What my GP did say was that frankly the old boy would not really be in a condition to really notice the environment on the ward and that when he was well enough to leave hospital, but not well enough to go home, we could move him to a convalescing home, such as Lynden Hills near Twyford.


I have also managed to sort out a couple of appointments for Mole and some of my halves for Monday. they will be given a tour of the NHS facilities on Monday afternoon, prior to a meeting with Mr Jiao at which concerns/issues and questions can be addressed.


I am trying to keep everyone (Mole, James and the halves) informed as much as I can. It is good to be busy trying to get information, make suggestions etc as it makes you feel as if you are doing something which, for me, feels very important at the moment.


I plan to tell the children this weekend. I will tell Minty (my 20 year old Exeter student) by phone and probably take William (10, Cothill) and Lydia (16, Downe House) out for lunch on Sunday and tell them at the same time as Tara (8, day school in London).

Diagnosis Day (D-Day) + 1

Yesterday afternoon my 75 year old father, Dad to me, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. I am a 48 year old married father of 4, with both parents still alive (and one grandparent), married to a girl whose parents are also still with us, so with all this life around us, this news has come as an awful shock. I feel that I want to chronicle this experience, warts and all. If nothing else, I think that it will help me. Who knows, in time perhaps it will help others. I hope so.

Background first.

Dad is 75. I would describe him as old school, right-wing, honest, frequently extremely funny and very dogmatic, occasionally bordering on bigoted. I would also describe him as a family man, devoted to his second wife (my step mother, Carolyn, or Mole as she is known by some), his five children (me, my brother James, half brothers George and Hugh and half sister Alice, hereafter referred to as “the halves”), racing, cigarette cards, Silk Cut and Deal or No Deal. I can’t promise that he would put them in the same order! He cannot abide political correctness, vegetables (except potatoes, roasted or chipped!), racing being referred to as horseracing, words such as “basically” or phrases such as “at the end of the day”. Are you getting the picture? In summary, he is an archetypal example and ideal candidate for the television series “Grumpy Old Men”.

It could be said to be something of a miracle that he has made it to this age, given his love of the daily fry up, Coca Cola (not Pepsi, Diet or any other version!), chocolate (any), McDonalds chicken nuggets and, of course, Silk Cut. And his loathing of vegetables could hardly be more extreme. One of the highlights of Christmas lunch with children and grandchildren (of which he has seven) is his annual attempt to avoid eating the one statutory brussel sprout. To the best of my knowledge our attempts have always been thwarted, by way of being smuggled into pockets, lobbed into flower pots. I think one year it turned up some days later in an ice bucket! Exercise has never featured all that highly on his list either. A brisk daily walk..........to the end of the road for papers/fags/chocolate is about as strenouous as it gets!

Probably also worth mentioning my step mother, Mole: born and raised in Sydney, she came to London in the lead up to the Commonwealth Games of 1970. She has many of the qualities associated with the Aussies (and some would say, some of the faults too!). Most importantly for the months ahead, she is as tough as teak, won’t take flannel from anyone (least of all Dad!), wants straight answers to forthright questions and will stop at nothing to aid his recovery. In short, she is perfectly cast for what will doubtless be a very difficult role.

By way of background, that is probably enough for the time being. Now, to explain the name of this blog. With an Aussie step mother and being a family of cricket lovers, a commonly used expression in our family when a crisis, large or small, amusing or not, arises is "Drama at the Gabba". It is derived from a line of commentary delivered by Richie Benaud, former Australian Test captain and latterly commentor. It was delivered during a Test match held in Brisbane at the Gabba cricket ground, after a particularly lively passage of play and Richie welcomed his audience back, after a commercial break, with the line "Drama at the Gabba".

Back to the big C. The good news, at this point, in the middle of such awful news, is that his cancer is operable, which is, by all accounts, pretty rare for pancreatic cancer, particularly in a man of his age. He has been lucky (that looks and sounds wrong) in that he was unwell about six weeks ago. He had a stent inserted in a tube running from his liver that was not in great shape and subsequent MRI scans suggested a possible lesion on his pancreas. A biopsy has shown the tissue to be malignant. His good fortune is therefore that, in relative terms, the illness has been diagnosed very early and, as a result, the tumour is small, so he has a better chance than the considerable majority of those unfortunate enough to contract this particularly pernicious strain of cancer.

Having worked extremely hard for most of his life and put all five children through private boarding schools at vast expense, as well as having done one divorce (!), pennies are not exactly bountiful and a relatively recent casualty was the private health insurance. The law of Sod says that cancelling insurance inevitably leads to an incident that would have been covered.

So, as things stand, the NHS is lined up to treat him. He is lucky (I use that word again) to be under a team at Hammersmith Hospital in London that has a global reputation for its research into and treatment of pancreatic cancers. To boot, it is only about three miles from home, which will make life considerably easier for Mole.

His reaction to the news, or at least the impression he conveyed, was entirely in keeping with what I would have expected. We all knew that yesterday was D (for decision) day and so I rang him to enquire as to the results. From the start of the call, it was like any of the huge number of telephone conversations that we have had over the years. He always starts a phone conversation with “Good morning/afternoon/evening to you”, in the style of the erstwhile BBC weather man Michael Fish!  Yesterday was no exception. He presented the broad facts in a thoroughly matter of fact way, akin to the way in which he might discuss the weather. Mole was more clued up on the facts……timings, size of tumour, convalescence time and so on.

Yesterday was the birthday of my half brother, George. He, as well as my other halves, Hugh and Alice, went for supper with Dad and Mole last night, at which the news was revealed. Given my father’s stoic nature and Mole’s front foot manner, it went, I understand, as well as could be expected.

Whilst this was going on, I was doing what, I imagine, many people in a similar situation do: namely, sitting at my computer typing phrases like “pancreatic cancer survival rate” and “pancreatic cancer operation” into Google and then trawling through the results. It is not an easy thing to do and I imagine that it makes the lives of healthcare specialists frequently extremely awkward, when dealing with patients and their families. But I am glad I did it. As a result I have a very basic understanding of the condition, its treatment and the inevitable statistics. The famous quote, attributed to Mark Twain “There are lies, damn lies and statistics” is as apposite here as it is in the investment management industry, in which I earn my crust. They don’t make pretty reading, but at least, as referred to above, he is lucky that it has been discovered so early and that the tumour is small and therefore operable.

So how do I feel about this? Last night I swung between occasional wobbles and stiff upper lip. I cannot bear the thought of the dreadful road that he must travel and that we must watch. But I know that every member of Team Farquhar must play their part in helping the old boy to beat this ghastly illness. I sent a text to my halves after they got home last night which I concluded with a quote from Homer’s Iliad: “Light is the task where many share the toil”. We are all in this together, we must support each other, cajole each other, care for each other, help each other get though this. We will.

I find myself now at the point of wanting to tell people and yet not feeling ready to tell my four children. My eldest is away at Exeter University, my second daughter and my son at boarding school and my youngest daughter at home. I feel I need to be able to tell them when I am confident that I can get from the first word to the final full stop without emotionally losing it and I do not feel ready for that. I have, however, sent an email to all my work colleagues (40 or so) telling them. My reason for wanting to do so is simple. I did not want the news to spread gradually around the company and, over the course of the next couple of weeks, have a stream of people offering sympathy: it is not the people offering sympathy that I want to avoid, I just want to get it out of the way and move on! Three hours on, I firmly believe it was the right thing to do. And it makes me want to tell all those who need to know as soon as possible. As I say, I want to get all the sympathy bit out of the way and move on.

Two pages into this, I can say with certainty that simply getting my thoughts down on paper helps. Typing the above has, by the simple act of thinking about what to say and how I feel it should be said, been therapeutic and has clarified feelings and made the first steps on the road ahead feel not so daunting.