METRO
A Cornish father and daughter diagnosed with the same rare incurable blood cancer three years apart are on a mission to fund new treatments before it’s too late.
Neil Pearce, from Looe, was diagnosed with myeloma back in December 2017 and is now on his final treatment option.
Despite suffering from nagging backache and fatigue for six months, his cancer was repeatedly missed and misdiagnosed first as polymyalgia (a condition that causes pain, stiffness and inflammation in the muscles) and then as rheumatoid arthritis.
By the time his myeloma was caught, Neil, then 71, had holes, or lesions, in his lower back.
In a cruel twist of fate, his daughter Hannah Pearce from Liskeard, was diagnosed with the same disease in 2020, after her cancer was missed for a year and initially misdiagnosed as costochondritis, an inflammation of the cartilage that connects a rib to the breastbone.
She was just 46 years old.
While Hannah has responded well to treatment, Neil’s cancer has unfortunately returned three times over the past five years.
Neil, 77, is currently on his last round of available chemotherapy, after which the grandfather-of-eight will have exhausted all treatment avenues.
Hannah is now gearing up to run the Edinburgh Marathon on Sunday 28 May in a bid to help charity Myeloma UK fund vital research into new treatments before her dad runs out of options.
She also hopes that sharing their struggles to get the right diagnosis will help raise awareness of the tell-tale symptoms and make sure others don’t have to endure what they went through.
The mother-of-one said: ‘We both had to wait to get a diagnosis and you can’t help but wonder “What if?”. What if I had both had an earlier diagnosis, would it have changed the outcome or the amount of years we will have with our families?’
‘I started getting pain and discomfort in my sternum in October 2019, but I wasn’t diagnosed until October 2020 – after several calls to the doctor, a chest X-ray which we now know was unfortunately misread, and even being told by a GP I was not in enough pain for it to be anything serious.
‘If I think back, the pain came and went but there were times when I couldn’t go to bed, I had to sleep upright in a chair. On occasions it was too painful to even hug my daughter Tegen…
