The America’s Cup veteran tells Greg Bruce he’s on a mission to save lives, including his own.
Dean Barker had found some blood in his poo but thought it was probably nothing. When it was still there after a few weeks, he went to see the doctor, who thought it was most likely haemorrhoids and prescribed him a cream for it. As good practice, and from an abundance of caution, he was also sent for a colonoscopy, a bowel examination described on Wikipedia as a “camera on a flexible tube passed through the anus”.
He was sedated for the procedure, had just returned to full consciousness and was still feeling a bit groggy when the doctor came in and told him they’d found a tumour.
It was as devastating as it was unexpected. His life flashed before his eyes. “You go to the absolute darkest place,” Barker says. He was 46 years old and the father of four.
He was sent for a CT scan in order to get a clearer picture of the tumour. Even now, nearly four years later, recounting the 90 or so minutes waiting for the results of that scan causes his voice to catch and his eyes to fill with tears. “Sorry,” he says, “I get a bit emotional at times.”
The CT scan showed the tumour hadn’t spread through the bowel lining, which seemed to be good news, but it would have to be removed as soon as possible. A week later he was in surgery having 30cm of his bowel removed, along with more than 20 lymph nodes, to see if the cancer had spread.
It took a week to get the results. “That was just brutal,” he says. “You’re getting to day six, day seven: ‘Is it supposed to take this long? Is it bad news? Is it good news?’”
During that time, he became extremely anxious. Against all advice, he began reading everything he could find about bowel cancer online, mostly horror stories.
“You really get yourself into a very dark place. But again, the doctor was really positive. The surgeon was like, ‘Oh, no, you’ll be fine. It hasn’t gone through the colon lining. It will be good.”
On the seventh day, he and wife Mandy were out walking their dog when he got the call telling him they’d discovered cancer in six of his lymph nodes.
He broke down, there on the footpath, in front of his wife and dog: “It just feels like a punch in the guts,” he says. “I think that was where it really probably sunk in.”
As bad as the news was, though, he felt a sense of relief that the waiting was over. “It’s just like you’ve hit the end of the road. There’s nothing more to learn.”
Barker’s first chemotherapy session was on New Year’s Eve 2019. Recalling that day again causes him to choke up with emotion: “Sorry,” he says. “It’s weird, you know, thinking it’s so long ago, but it still makes you really, you know … ”
The medical specialists he had seen had been relentlessly positive throughout the process, but when it came to chemotherapy, the nurse told a different story: “Man, did she put the fear of God in you,” he says. “She said, ‘Look, this is going to be really bad’.”
Every fortnight for six months, he sat for up to four hours in a room with 16 other cancer sufferers, some terminal, most much older than him, being drip-fed the chemicals that would ravage their bodies in the hopes of extending their lives.
After six or seven hours, he would leave the room with a bag of chemicals that would continue to pump into a port in his chest every 10 minutes for the next two days. In order to get some sleep at night, he would have to bury the pump under a pile of pillows.
Because this was early 2020 and Covid was just taking off, he wasn’t allowed to take anyone in with him for support. He describes the experience as lonely, “just sitting there, watching all these poisons that are going in.”
Barker, now 50, showed me a photo of his homecoming celebration after his last chemo session. Although he is one of this country’s most recognisable faces, and was sitting directly in front of me, I had to ask if the person in the photo was him. He looked frail and hunched, his hair was thin, his face puffed up like a beach ball. It was hard to imagine he would, just a few months after the photo was taken, skipper the American challenger in the America’s Cup. By the last few sessions of chemo, he says, he was thinking: ‘Man, I’m not sure I can actually see it out’.”
In the photo he showed me, his family had decked the place out with balloons and a sign saying “KICKING CANCER’S BUTT”. “Kicking”, though, is quite different from “kicked”.
In America, where he was first diagnosed and went through chemo, Barker says the profile of the typical bowel cancer sufferer looks nothing like him: “It’s black, elderly, overweight, unfit, smokers, drinkers. And I’m going, okay, well, I tick none of those boxes. Not one. And I’m like, ‘Why?’”
This is the unanswerable question. Something like bowel cancer is too complex to reduce to a single cause but one contributing factor that has been ever-present in his life is stress, particularly the stress of being one of the leading characters in the world’s most important yacht race. As he puts it: “Dealing with the ups and certainly the downs.”
Looking back, he says, maybe he should have said enough’s enough and pulled out of the 2021 America’s Cup: “You’ve got to take care of yourself first and foremost. You’re so involved in the whole thing, you don’t want to be away from it, but after the ‘21 Cup finished, it was like, ‘Well, okay, life has to change because your body’s telling you something’.”
Still, he says he has never wished he’d lived a different life from the one in which he shouldered – three times – the unbelievable emotional load that comes with being the skipper, the face and the prime public target of unsuccessful campaigns to win this country the America’s Cup.
“I don’t regret anything I’ve done. I’ve been incredibly fortunate to be involved with some amazing teams. My experience with Team New Zealand, that was a huge part of my life. And lifelong friends and things from there, the experiences, good and bad, the travel. Everything has been a fantastic experience.
“It would have been nice to win a couple more of them, but, you know, it’s just the way life goes and you have to continue to move on. But I do obviously question, like, if I had chosen a completely different pathway, would I have been sitting with the same sort of diagnosis at the end of 2019? For one thing, you’ll never know.”
Barker doesn’t think he’ll sail at America’s Cup level again. “It’s a young man’s game now,” he says. But he still loves the Cup. He is now a part-time coach for Alinghi, flying to Barcelona every two or three months to work with them, but says he has no desire to put himself back into an environment where he’s forced to deal with the stress of a high-level position.
“Even if it was like a management role, it just feels like you’d be sort of putting yourself back in the same position, because you can’t enter those campaigns without actually having 100 per cent emotional involvement. Because you just work so hard towards the goal, you just know that you’ll be back in this exact same spot.”
He is now in a regular, high-rotation series of blood tests, colonoscopies and CT scans, each of which brings with them the worry and stress of waiting to see if the cancer has returned.
Last year, after a CT scan showed a shadow on his lung, he was sent for surgery to have a small section of it removed, and when it was sent for a biopsy, it turned out to be cancer. It was the same cancer that was found in his bowel, rather than a secondary cancer, which would have been much worse news.
He says that although his doctors now feel very strongly they’ve got it all, he feels like he’s in a waiting game: “Every time you sort of feel something in your body, straight away you’re very suspicious of what that might be.”
When his last colonoscopy, late last year, revealed polyps – which, while not cancer and are easily removed – he says it felt like a kick in the teeth.
“You just have to carry on and just continue to live life as though you are through the worst of it and you’ve got the opportunity to live a full life. But maybe in the back of your mind you’re always thinking the what-ifs. Every time you go for a blood test, waiting for the call from the doctor saying it’s all good, carry on.”
A year ago, Barker decided he wanted to do something to help raise awareness of bowel cancer (“I just feel that if you can help to change one person’s outcome, then it’s a success”) so he looked up the Bowel Cancer New Zealand website, found a phone number and rang.
After getting through to the campaigns manager, he told his story and said he’d love to be involved. Her initial response was lukewarm. He says that, after a while, she said: “Look, who am I actually talking to?”
Now, as an ambassador for the organisation, he wants to make sure that people listen to their bodies and look for symptoms because there’s a very high chance that, if caught early, bowel cancer can be treated and sufferers can go on to live a normal life.
He had kept his illness private for three years, before he went public late last year in an interview with John Campbell on TVNZ’s Sunday programme that made headlines around the country. The segment also included an interview with one of the country’s leading bowel cancer specialists, Professor Frank Frizelle. Barker says that, within a week of the programme airing and as a direct result of seeing it, two men went to see Frizelle. Both had bowel cancer.
“The great thing with it is that it is treatable if it’s caught early enough,” he says. “But Kiwi males, particularly the ‘she’ll be right’ attitude, is not going to be what allows you to get on to it early enough. I look back at my situation and when I first discovered a bit of the blood in the stool, I didn’t think too much of it. I thought, ‘It’s obviously something not quite right, but I’m sure it’ll be fine’.
“To me, that was the biggest message out of it all – when I started reading about it and learning more and more about it – was the fact that it is very curable, provided you get onto it early enough. It’s where you leave it too long and it does move around the body, then that’s when it becomes problematic.”
The diagnosis has completely changed his outlook on life. He is spending more time with his family and friends. His relationship with Mandy is stronger than ever.
“It makes you realize that you’re not around forever, and while you’d like to think you’re going to live a long and full life, maybe that’s not the case. We are fragile, I guess.”
Every month, 250 New Zealanders are diagnosed with bowel cancer and 100 die from it. It kills as many of us as breast and prostate cancer combined. Bowel Cancer New Zealand’s Move Your Butt challenge runs through June, encouraging all New Zealanders to take up a fitness challenge and get sponsored to raise both money and awareness of the disease.