A previously fit dad shockingly diagnosed with stage four cancer says he was left looking like the “Nightmare on Elm Street” after a horror reaction to chemotherapy left him too embarrassed to go to his young son’s cricket matches – and he is now hoping to save his life with a ground-breaking vaccine. Geoffrey Seymour, 41, a procurement specialist, loved playing tennis, basketball and cricket and had always been healthy until just before his 41st birthday when he began experiencing blood in his stool. Geoffrey was aware of this being a symptom for cancer from adverts on the television, so quickly went to his GP.
Geoffrey, who lives in Richmond, London, with his wife Santa, 44, and their son Marco, 10, was diagnosed with stage four colorectal cancer, which had spread from his colon to his liver – a situation so severe and seemingly hopeless he likened it to “being wrapped in a paper bag that is on fire”. He also had a bad reaction to chemotherapy severely blistering the skin on his face and, according to Geoffrey, making him look like Freddy Krueger from the 1984 horror film, Nightmare on Elm Street.
The chemotherapy stopped working however and now, in an attempt to save his life, Geoffrey has travelled to Germany for dendritic cell therapy – where a personalised vaccine is created in a lab with the aim of stimulating the immune system. Research in this area is at an early stage, according to Cancer Research UK, and so the treatment was not cheap – just one injection in Germany, on October 17, cost £17,000 and Geoffrey is now waiting to see if it was enough to help him, while continuing to fundraise to pay for it.
