Clarke speaks to The Drum on return to work at The Bridge
The Drum spoke with Alan Clarke, one of the directors at The Bridge in Glasgow who has recently returned to work after a period of recuperation following his battle against throat cancer.
Over the next five-days, Clarke will discuss the battle against his illness, how he discovered it and the impact that it has had on the company and his own work.
When did you find out you had throat cancer?
The first sign was when I discovered what I thought were swollen glands but only in one side of my neck - that was mid-December 2008. I put that down to just being a bit run down because I’d been working hard.
With the benefit of hindsight there had been other symptoms (fatigue in particular) but all of them I could easily put down to other factors e.g. I had put the fatigue down to the fact we were mid MBO negotiations and I was literally doing 12-14 hour days every day.
It was only really post Christmas when the glands in the left hand side of my neck were still swollen that I began to think it might be something that needed addressed (or, to be honest, my wife said I had to go to the doctor...or else). Instead of going to see him, I called and he said not to be alarmed just yet but if they hadn’t gone down in two weeks he wanted to see me. Needless to say they didn’t go down and my first appointment with a doctor for what turned out to be cancer in my tonsils was the morning before the signing meeting where we concluded the MBO.
From that things moved very quickly. The doctor subsequently told me I fitted the profile of someone who was likely to be seriously unwell - I seldom went to the doctor (most things had previously cured themselves in few days with the help of a couple of paracetomol...), I was clearly someone with a busy work life (who wouldn’t waste his time (never mind the doctors) going to see a doctor with something minor, I was (approaching..or perhaps in) middle age and, most significant of all given all these factors, I was a man.
Within two weeks of seeing my GP I’d had an appointment with an Ear, Nose and Throat consultant, I had a scan of the lump (which showed there a was one large one I could feel but also a number of smaller ones), a biopsy was taken from the lump and it had been arranged for me to have a single tonsil removed because the docs had seen some form of ‘abnormality’ on it. I remember asking at the time why they were only taking one tonsil out and not them both ...they said “it’s very painful, so we don’t take out more than we have to”, little did I or they know that two weeks later they’d be removing the whole of the back of my throat!! It was the day that I went for my tonsil removal pre-assessment that they confirmed I had cancer.
Tommorrow Clarke discusses the reaction by the company to his illness and sudden long-term absence.
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