For Petey’s Sake

The eyes have it…

aving survived a nasty and highly elusive cancer, Delgany’s Peter Robbie is keen to give some advice – and to give back…

Which is why we’re giving the man the floor…

Okay, so I am on the scrounge. Let me tell you why.

ack in May of this year, I was diagnosed, out of the blue, with a very rare and aggressive cancer of the urethra. Unfortunately, at the time of my consultation, Ivor Cullen – the acknowledged expert in this field – was unable to tell me whether or not I would survive this cancer.

This certainly concentrated my mind, I can tell you that. He took me in and put me on his ‘urgent’ list. I first saw him on May 10th and the operation was carried out on the 20th. Luckily, Ivan seems to have removed the entire tumor, which turned out to be a fairly whopping 6.4cm in size. Unfortunately, this meant that I had to part ways with my urethra and penis, but a small price to pay for continued existence.

And no jokes about a very small price, thank you.

I have recently been given the positive news that the operation was a success and the results were better than we could have had a right to expect or even hope for. My prognosis seems good and the view is now that I will not need chemo or radio therapy, just very intensive monitoring, CT scans, MRI’s and a camera into my bladder, just to confirm that nothing unpleasant is still lurking.

I am not writing this looking for sympathy. No, I am writing to the good people in this area, firstly to inform them that it is imperative for any men, especially over the age of fifty, visit their doctors and get an annual check up. My symptoms were so mild, it was only by the grace of God and the nagging of the memsahib, bless her, that made me visit Conor Downes, who started the whole investigation process, which is why I am still here.

Dr Ivor Cullen

Secondly, I have found out that the team who saved my life and gave me a future, are criminally under-funded and under-staffed. To this end, I have asked them if it would be okay for me to start a fund raising page for them. I am begging anybody out there who knows me or knows of me, whether you appreciate or hate my little rants, to please dig deep and send whatever you can to the following link here.

In case you are wondering about the ‘beating Franklin’ reference, it is merely because I chose to name my tumor. It was a fairly simple task of picking the name Franklin, after the famed musician Urethra Franklin. I apologise for the bad pun, but I needed to be able to laugh about something at the time and that did the trick. Call it tumor humour.

If you are interested enough to find out more of why I am looking for donations, I did an interview recently with Joe Duffy on Liveline. The link for that should be right here. If the link is still active, it will let you know exactly how my adventure started.

Many thanks for getting this far and I am really hoping that you good people can help me out with this fund raising effort. I will be trying to arrange some events, like pub quizze, etc. And I have listed my target as a mere €500, but I only picked this, as I have no idea how much it will be possible to raise. This wonderful team need real money and I’m afraid that to make any real difference, we will need to be looking at thousands, so please dig as deeply as you can. Every penny will help.

There are many others out there with their own Franklins, so let’s see if we can really beat them all. Respect!