It was the ‘special medal’ which lured Tony Collier to go through hell and back again.
In 2016, Tony, a 59-year-old accountant from Altrincham completed his first ultra-marathon, a 56-mile endeavour which he finished in nine hours and 46 minutes. He swore he’d never do it again, but the offer of the ‘special medal’ for runners who complete the same ultra two years in-a-row convinced him.
The race was to be held in June, southern hemisphere winter, so by the time British spring sprang, Tony, now 60, was in full flow, training regularly.
“I was the fittest non-professional athlete you could see,” he recalled. But on Monday, May 8, something didn’t feel right. Tony thought he suffered a groin strain, booking in with a sports injury doctor for an MRI scan.
By Tuesday evening, Tony was alone, driving home, ‘in floods of tears’. Ready to have ‘a horrible conversation’.
“[My sports injury doctor] called me at seven o’clock to say he was 99pc sure it was cancer,” Tony told the Manchester Evening News.
“I was 15 minutes from home and I had to drive home in floods of tears because I had to break the news to my wife… That was a horrible conversation.”
Just 10 days later, a urologist confirmed Tony’s diagnosis was terminal cancer, giving him ‘two years to live’. It turned out the groin strain was a stress fracture of the spine, caused by his prostate cancer, which began developing when Tony was 50.
“I was as fit as a fiddle,” he said. “It was a real shock to find out I had terminal cancer.”
In the intervening decade, the cancer developed and spread so it became incurable. But it didn’t have to be like that.
Tony explained: “If I had known about my right to a prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test from age 50, they would’ve caught it earlier when it was curable.”
A PSA test is a £28 tool available on the NHS that measures the amount of a protein made by the prostate gland, which can be a marker for cancer.
Now 68, Tony raises awareness of men’s rights to a PSA test, and campaigns for mass prostate screening, something the UK National Screening Committee opted not to recommend last week.
Tony believes the decision was based on out-dated thinking: “Historically, if a man went to the GP for a PSA test and it had a high reading, he would’ve a trans-rectal biopsy that could lead to sepsis and death, [or] a man with an indolent cancer could then be overtreated.
“But that was 25 years ago. Now, if you have a PSA reading high enough, you go straight through MRI and there are some more targeted biopsies. In the old days screening did more harm than good, we think that’s been turned on its head now.”
Last week’s decision was ‘devastating’, he added: “I’m really upset because we have campaigned hard. They’ve agreed to screen men with BRCA one or two. That’s only 30,000 men in the country.”
Tony will continue to fight on for mass screening and raise awareness for the PSA test, earning a standing ovation at Manchester Town Hall last week as councillors agreed to kick-start a new PSA test awareness campaign in the city, a move Coun Olusegun Ogunbambo said ‘will save lives’.
The councillor added: “We want faster treatment for everyone. We want better outcomes for everyone in Manchester. That means living longer.”
Fortunately for Tony, he is living longer than expected, now aged 68. He spends his time with his grandchildren, taking trips abroad, and running even more to fundraise, finishing his second ultra-marathon in 2022.
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