ROBERT SHAW
Curing Cancer one ski crash at a time
Ski Club Member Robert Shaw shares his inspirational tale of being diagnosed with cancer following a collision on the pistes
Robert raising a beer at La Crémaillère, Les Lindarets in 2017. It was a triumphant moment; symbolic of achieving a goal he set while in intensive care to return here once recovered.
The February 2015 half-term week found me skiing with three generations of my family in the Portes du Soleil area, based in Morzine. One morning, No. 2 son-in-law and I had skied to Switzerland from Avoriaz and were cruising gently down into Les Crosets on a fairly empty and wide-open piste.
Suddenly, and without warning, I was smashed into from behind, stunning me and shattering one ski.
My son-in-law was a little behind me and described an overweight and incompetent skier, snow-ploughing out of control and using me as buffers. He picked himself up, dusted himself off, uttered a few words (which I do not remember exactly but they were in English), and promptly disappeared off downhill. I was 68 at the time, but he hadn’t killed me.
After a few moments, I picked myself up and we walked down into Les Crosets to buy a pair of replacement skis in order to get back to Morzine. A couple of stiff drinks anaesthetised me to the severe pain in my upper back and we were able to get to Avoriaz, where my wife met us with the car.
The Morzine clinic X-rayed me, pronounced that I had broken two ribs and sold me horse-grade pain killers and anti-inflammatories. A second visit and X-ray before we left for England elicited a diagnosis of three broken ribs. I was advised to take myself to hospital when I got home.
The walk-in X-ray clinic at Charing Cross Hospital found a total of four broken ribs. Fortunately, none were displaced, so it was just a matter of spending six weeks trying not to sneeze, cough or laugh.
Some weeks later, I collapsed with massive blood loss and was blue-lighted to A&E. The upper echelons of the NHS could only explain this as a possible reaction to the horse-grade French medication.
With his extended family in Niederau, Austria
Investigations progressed through the summer of 2015 and, as a final shot at finding if anything was amiss, the consultant sent me for a gastroscopy – a ‘top-end- oscopy’. Within hours of a biopsy result, I was summoned to St Mary’s Hospital to meet an Upper GI surgeon, who informed me that I had a cancer in my oesophagus. He added that it was small, that he could remove it after some chemotherapy and that, while I’d have a pretty unpleasant few months, I would be fine (and a stone-and-a-half lighter) in a year’s time.
I did go through chemotherapy, I did have a 10-hour operation, and I was pretty fragile for a while. However, by the end of summer 2016, I was back on my surfboard and, in January 2017, I was back on skis on the slopes of Portes du Soleil.
But there is a moral somewhere in this story: without that incompetent Anglo-idiot in the green anorak in Les Crosets, I wouldn’t have had the cancer diagnosed – until it was too late – and would probably by now have had my ashes scattered on the dunes behind my Cornish surfing beach, rather than having enjoyed another multi-generational ski week in February 2020, albeit this year in the Tyrol.
