It was 2019 when Dean Barker was told he had bowel cancer, changing his life forever. His first round of chemotherapybegan on New Year’s Eve of that year. It was a devastating time for both him and his family, and while the chemo worked, the years since have not always been easy either. There has been the brutal effects of chemo on his body, the ongoing anxiety of the regular barrage of tests, and the occasional hammer blow of bad news, such as the CT scan in 2021 that found cancer in his lung.
His doctors have told him they feel like they’ve got it all, but he still feels like he’s in a waiting game. He says his anxiety rises every time he goes for another round in the seemingly endless testing, including regular blood tests, CT scans and colonoscopies.
Dean Barker says his anxiety rises every time he goes for another round in the seemingly endless testing. Photo / Photosport
His emotions when talking about it in June were often close to the surface. But, speaking just a few days before Christmas, he’s feeling good. He’s just had the results of his annual CT scan and it’s clear.
Although he wasn’t expecting them to find anything, he says it’s always a relief when they don’t.
“It’s a pretty nervy time,” he says. “You start sensing the fact that you’ve got it coming up. You get anxious.”
He would usually have had his annual colonoscopy in December as well, but he’s put that off until the new year. While there’s always anxiety about that too, he says, his awareness of what’s happening in his body is now so heightened that, “You know in a lot of ways whether there is anything going on.”
Dean Barker's diagnosis has taught him that there’s nowhere else to live but the present. Photo / Photosport
He says that once he’s been cancer-free for five years, he’ll have no greater likelihood of it returning than the average person on the street, but his diagnosis has taught him that there’s nowhere else to live but the present.
“It’s trying to maintain a very positive outlook on life, not sort of look back and sort of get angry or sort of wonder about all the what ifs because as we know, there is no ability to change anything in our past. All we can do is try and have a positive impact in the future.
“And without question, the outlook on life changed at the same time as the diagnosis because it made you realise that A) you’re not bulletproof and B) you do need to be able to enjoy it while you can.
“That is one thing that you definitely realise. It’s easy to keep putting things off: ‘I think I’ll do that next year’, or in a couple of years, or whatever it might be. But you just never know.”
