Boris Sokratov' s health insurance has ensured he gets the best treatment available.
Boris Sokratov' s health insurance has ensured he gets the best treatment available.
Opinion by Boris Sokratav
THREE KEY FACTS
About 25,000 New Zealanders are diagnosed with cancer each year.
The most commonly diagnosed cancers in New Zealand (excluding non-melanoma skin cancers) are breast, melanoma, lung, prostate and colorectal cancers.
Māori are more likely than non-Māori to be diagnosed with a range of cancers, including breast, liver, lung, pancreatic, stomach and uterine.
Boris Sokratov is a Bulgarian-Māori and has whakapapa to Te Rarawa, Ngati Haua. He was the producer of the Nutters Club Radio Show and helped establish the I am Hope Foundation. He is also undergoing intense radiation and chemotherapy for a rare aggressive cancer called small cell neuroendocrine carcinoma.
My mum, Rose Teaomarama Sokratov (nee Henare), grew up in a mud-floor nikau-palm-thatched-roof hut in a remote part of the Far North. My dad, Christo Nikoloff Sokratov, escaped across the border from Bulgaria into Turkey during the Cold War in 1948, where he lived in a refugee camp before migrating to New Zealand in 1951 aboard the Goya.
I was born in 1960 at St Helens Hospital in Auckland’s Pitt St, not far from where we lived in the so-called slums of Freemans Bay. Back then 72 Franklin Rd was a two-storey boarding house. Together with my younger sister Ana, we all lived in one room of that boarding house.
Boris Sokratov has just completed 25 consecutive days of radiation therapy and 4 cycles of chemotherapy, and has 2 rounds to complete.
Fortunately for our whānau, in 1968 our family GP wrote to the State Advances Corporation supporting our application for a state house on the grounds that I had rheumatic fever. Our application was approved so we moved to a two-storey triplex in Crossfield Rd, Glendowie. It was around the corner from Madeline Ave - shortened to Mad Ave - which was supposedly the worst street in New Zealand.
At 18, I scored a job as a messenger boy running errands at Charles Haines Advertising by writing a letter to the managing director saying they should employ me because I wanted to work for them.
Haines, now called FCB, was the biggest agency in NZ. They had Southern Cross as a client.
On my 20th birthday, the MD said I should take out private medical insurance because the agency had a heavily subsidised employee scheme. I didn’t know what it was but did it anyway. Forty-four years later, much to my good fortune and to the regret of Southern Cross, I still have it.
The Harbour Cancer Centre.
Before my cancer diagnosis four months ago, I’d already had 20 surgical procedures under general anesthetic - primarily for sports injuries, all covered by Southern Cross.
In 2023 I had an angiogram, two colonoscopies and two more significant medical-related surgical procedures.
My mother died of bowel cancer, which is why since the age of 50 at my wife’s insistence (she’s a GP) I get a regular colonoscopy.
In August last year, prior to my routine colonoscopy, I phoned my colo-rectal surgeon and asked if he could cut out what I thought was a problematic haemorrhoid. Turns out I have a very rare condition called peri-anal Paget’s disease, not haemorrhoids. What’s worse is it has a habit of recurring. It did and it has again.
In April I had a “follow-up” colonoscopy to see if everything was tickety-boo. What more could go wrong in such a short time?
A lot.
Boris Sokratov' s home away from home at North Harbour Cancer
and Wellness centre.
Not only had the Paget’s disease come back, the cherry on top is I now also have small cell neuroendocrine carcinoma. It’s a very rare, fast-moving, cunning and aggressive cancer.
But here’s the thing, apart from the side effects of my combined chemo and radiation cocktails, I have absolutely no symptoms.
In truth, if it wasn’t for private medical insurance and if I had to go through the public system, I’d probably be pushing up daisies.
That’s because in the public system, by the time I would have seen a specialist, and by the time my cancer symptoms would have been detected, there’s a big chance I would already have been too far gone.
How do I know?
The simplest metric to understand is proliferation rate - the speed at which the cancer cells spread. At stage 3, a proliferation rate of 20-30% is considered high. My proliferation rate is 60%. So I’m off the chart.
How rare, you ask? The world population is approaching 8.2 billion people. In a year, maybe a couple of hundred men will present with Paget’s. As for the small cell neuroendocrine carcinoma, well, maybe a handful of people in the world might get it. According to Google Gemini, in the US there have been 60 cases reported in the past 60 years.
There is some benefit in being a medical anomaly. Everyone in the medical field is “interested”. If they can save me, it will be an achievement worthy of a medical journal paper.
Because I have Southern Cross insurance, all of my medical costs have been covered - from diagnosis, to scans, lab tests and chemotherapy and radiation that I started two weeks ago. My treatment involves six cycles of chemotherapy three days a week. I then have a couple of weeks off because the chemotherapy is fairly harsh transfusions.
Chemotherapy followed by radiation can be draining.
I’ve completed four rounds of chemo. Rounds three and four were the toughest because on Wednesday it’s 7.5 hours of chemo followed immediately by radiation. Thursday and Friday chemotherapy is only two to two and half hours, then on the Saturday I have to be injected with a white cells stimulant because my immunity system gets smashed by the chemo drugs. That injection knocks the stuffing out of me for another couple of days.
The radiation treatment was 25 days in a row and was completed last Tuesday. My rear end has effectively been BBQ’d to try and destroy the tumour.
While it hasn’t been a pleasant experience, I remain forever grateful to have the privilege of being able to afford Southern Cross for more than 40 years. That’s a benefit very few of my Māori cousins can afford.
In this great land of ours, life expectancy of a Māori male is 73. That’s 2920 days less than a non-Māori male, at 81.
I will be forever grateful to my wife, family and friends for their unconditional support. And I can’t speak highly enough of my angels, the team responsible for my care plan: my GP, the pathologists who analysed my biopsy, the national inter-disciplinary cancer team, my colo-rectal surgeon, medical oncologist, radiation oncologist, chemotherapy nurses, radiation nurses and technicians, schedulers, admin and reception staff who ensure my care is the best it can be.
The question remains: Is cancer going to kill me or will my private health insurance save me?
Boris Sokratov is undergoing intense chemotherapy and radiation to battle an aggressive form of cancer.
To be completely candid, right now the odds aren’t in my favour. That said, I remain in relatively good cheer and remain forever hopeful that it will. I won’t know until later this year.
That’s the thing about life, we know not what it has in store for us or where it may lead.
While I don’t fear death, I’m in no hurry to go anywhere any sooner than I have to. I’ve got far too many things still to do. Be more than a tad inconvenient for me if I died right now.
When all is said and done, all we really are is a collection of memories.
Hold fast to the good memories, let go the not so good, and hold onto hope because hope is the key to life. That’s what I intend to do.
