Thanks to radiation treatment and a thyroidectomy, Chris Mayberry survived papillary thyroid cancer.

DESCRIPTION

Chris Mayberry’s cancer journey began when he detected a lump on his neck while shaving.  Right away, he got it checked out and that resulted in his diagnosis of papillary thyroid cancer. 

A retired broadcaster from Stouffville, Ontario, near Toronto, Chris’ proactive approach resulted in early detection and the best possible outcome.

He was in good health at the time he discovered the lump, concluded it needed to be examined and went to a doctor.  The doctor said Chris needed to be seen by a surgeon, and the surgeon said had to be removed.  The surgery was performed, and even though the surgeon thought the lump was probably benign, it was subject to a biopsy.  However, the tumor was malignant and Chris Mayberry was told he had papillary thyroid cancer, the most common form of thyroid cancer. 

Next, Chris went through a complete thyroidectomy, and one bout of radiation.  He said the process was done in about two months.  Incredibly, first with the removal of the lump, then the thyroidectomy, there was no pain.

Chris had followup visits with his surgeon and achieved survivorship, but from the day he was diagnosed, he lived in fear, unable to get the words, “You’ve got cancer.” 

Thankfully, the doubt began to recede.  When he reached the five-year mark after his treatment, Chris threw a party.  From that point forward, Chris Mayberry’s life was very close to normal, although even now he admits it will never be what it was, pre-diagnosis.

Physically, Chris says he can do anything he could do before his diagnosis.  It is just that now, he doesn’t have a thyroid, which for all of us serves as a command center for almost everything physical, mental and emotional.  In terms of energy, there can be highs and lows;  mood swings can be wild.  Chris occasionally suffers from depression and in his first few years after his treatment, he would experience panic attacks. From a physical perspective, they had many of the same symptoms as a heart attack, including chest pains and difficulty breathing.  But thankfully with the passage of time, they have tapered off. 

Chris Mayberry is quick to admit that compared to everyone else diagnosed with cancer, his journey was rather uneventful; but he said a lot of that had to do with his being proactive, and that resulted in early detection.

By way of advice, Chris says to always remember you are not alone.  There are individuals and organizations that can provide the necessary support.  That said, it is of utmost importance to be your own advocate and when you notice something abnormal, not to hesitate, but to make sure you get the issue checked out.

Additional Resources:

Support Group:

Thyroid Cancer Survivors’ Association: https://www.thyca.org

TRANSCRIPT

Bruce Morton: Greetings, and welcome to the Cancer Interviews podcast.  I’m your host, Bruce Morton.  On this segment, we will be hearing from a guy whose cancer journey was eased by early detection.  He is our first-ever Canadian guest, Chris Mayberry of Stouffville, Ontario.  If early detection is a possibility for you, we hope Chris’ story will inspire you to maximize that possibility.  So, now let’s get to it, and Chris, welcome to Cancer Interviews.

Chris Mayberry: Thank you, Bruce, it’s great to be here.

BM: We always start off our interviews from the same place because we want to personalize our guests and know that they are more than just people battling cancer, that they are real people with real lives.  So, Chris, if you would, tell us a bit about where you are from, what you do for work, and what you like to do when you are not working, that sort of thing.

CM: I was born in 1953 in Windsor, Ontario, and moved to London when I was six years old with my family, London, Ontario, not England, and got into radio in the mid-seventies, worked in London, Ottawa, and then in Toronto, where I spent 25 of my 40 years in the business with the Canadian Press, or, Broadcast News, which was CP’s broadcast division.  I covered sports for them for many years, then became a newscaster and after 25 years, I retired.  I am happily retired now, I am 68 years old, and I like to cram as much nothing into my days as I can, but seriously, I do volunteer work for a local radio station in town and I have done some hockey play-by-play for the local team here in Stoghffville.  It’s a great little town, about 35 miles northeast of Toronto, and, wonderful people, and I couldn’t be happier.

BM: You did news, and you did sports.  Which did you like better?

CM: I love sports, and sports was the original goal when I first got into radio.  I was pretty fortunate.  When I was in college, I was working at the local station in London as basically an unpaid intern.  I would cover games just for the experience of it, Junior ‘A’ hockey games in London, university sports with Western Ontario, and that really paid off because just after I got into the business, the sports director left, and they hired me.  Here I am, just a few years out of high school in my hometown on the morning show, doing local sports.  It was great, and I was there for about four years, and they had a change in regime, and I found myself deciding whether I want to stay in radio or not.  I had done a bit of work driving a cube truck on my summers off growing up and I thought maybe I will do that for a living.  So, I left the station in London, and got a call from a station in Ottawa.  They were looking for a sports guy.  I sent them a tape, and to make a long story short, they hired me, and I ended up doing play-by-play for the Junior ‘A’ hockey team there which was a great thrill.  It was something I always wanted to try and do.  I probably set the art back about 50 years, but it was fun, and then a job at the sister station in Toronto came open, and I moved there in the mid-eighties I guess, and covering the Blue Jays, and I think that’s where I met you, Bruce, in New York one time, at a Blue Jays series in 1985, and was there until the top of the next decade, then my old boss from the station in Toronto was running the show at Canadian Press and he hired me to run their sports department.

BM: My grasp of Toronto sports history isn’t all that it might be, but based on the chronology that you are imparting, it sounds like you might have been in Toronto when the Blue Jays won their World Series championships, and if so, describe that experience.

CM: Oh, it was incredible.  There were two funny stories.  The first was in Atlanta when the Jays won the first of two World Series in 1992, winning it in Atlanta in Game Six.  It was such a story from coast to coast.  The Jays were not a Toronto team, they were a Canadian team then and probably still are for that matter.  The poor, overwhelmed guy in the audio room was taking clips from basically every town in Canada that had a party, so every news room was calling him, saying, “Here’s our party on Main Street and here’s some tape if you want to run it out and he was being besieged by these happy calls from everywhere across Canada, so when I phoned in with my first batch of audio clips from the dressing rooms and the scene in Atlanta, the audio guy’s first question to me was, forgetting where I was, he said, “What’s it like where you are?”  Thinking back that the Braves had just lost the World Series, I was thinking it is pretty subdued here, to be honest with you, so that was one story.  The second was a year later when Joe Carter hit the home run, the walkoff home run to win the World Series.  I was sitting in the pressbox, and I had my story all written, Game Seven tomorrow night, the Phillies win Game Six, they have won two in a row, look out, Blue Jays, we saw this before in 1985.  So, I had it ready to go, they were two outs away from losing I think at that point, and three things went through my head when the ball cleared the wall was, “Wow!”  The second was I was just an eyewitness to one of the great moments in baseball history, and the third was, I better get to work.  So I had to quickly phone in and deliver a quick voicer on the fly and get to work pretty quickly and it was an experience I will never forget. 

BM: You haven’t mentioned anything to indicate otherwise, but it sounds like through all this, you were in good health, yes?

CM: I was.  I was a little overweight and am still a little overweight, but I was in great health, and as the next year dawned, in 1994, I was doing a fair bit of traveling for the Canadian Press.  The baseball playoffs and World Series had taken me to Chicago and Philadelphia and in early 1994, I was off to Norway for the Olympics, then down to baseball spring training as soon I got back, then back to Germany for the World Curling Championships, so as ’94 was progressing, I was feeling great, then baseball had its labor problems, so there were no Blue Jays to cover and they weren’t going to make the playoffs that year, then all of a sudden, everything changed in September of 1994.

BM: What happened?

CM: I was shaving one morning, getting ready to go to work, and I noticed a lump in my neck.  I guess I had had it for a while.  I am just shaving without thinking about it, but then I thought to myself, “What’s that?”  We had just moved to a town called Pickering, just east of Toronto, so I was between doctors.  I didn’t have a family doctor at the time, so after work that day, I went into a local medical clinic and the young doctor who I had never met before, asked, “What’s this?  Does it hurt?”  I said no, it doesn’t hurt at all.  He said that wasn’t the answer he was looking for, but the lump needs to be looked at, so they scheduled a meeting with a surgeon.  He looked at it, said it is probably benign, but it’s gotta come out.  So, they had surgery, removed it, so I am waiting, and the waiting is the worst part because there is the possibility this might be malignant.  Almost everybody was assuring me that it’s not, but the word came down, that sure enough, it was malignant.  I had cancer.  I had thyroid cancer, it was papillary thyroid cancer, which is the most common thyroid cancer, and I heard the word cancer, and my life fell apart.  They were saying I’ll be fine, the odds of surviving this are huge because it probably hasn’t traveled anywhere and you caught it early enough that you’ll be fine, but that didn’t matter.  I had just heard the ‘C’ word and thought, “When am I going to die?”  The word cancer is so, more than frightening.  It chills you, you know, Bruce, you have been through this, too, you are just frozen to the spot, and it’s just, “Oh, God, now what?”  It turns out they had a complete thyroidectomy for me.  I went through one bout of radiation.  The whole experience was done in two months, and being in Canada, which was very fortunate for me, I didn’t pay a dime because we have health care here.  Beyond that, for the next few years, I was still living in fear, for the next quite a few years, because…I had cancer.  I wondered, what if it comes back?  I had followup interviews with my doctor, my surgeon, they went through the whole routine and, they said I was fine and to come back, you’re on this medication now, see me in six months, no change, everything’s good, but it was many, many, many years before I wouldn’t look in the mirror in the morning and look for lumps.  I don’t know how else to describe it, it was just such a chilling thing.  No matter how many times a doctor would tell me I would be fine and live a perfectly normal life, I didn’t believe ‘em.  I defaulted back to that one word: Cancer.  Now I have since learned to realize that I am one of the very lucky ones and compared to you and some of the people you have had on the podcast, Bruce, my cancer was extremely mild.  The odds of surviving it were in the high nineties.  I am almost embarrassed to be part of the podcast because my experience pales in comparison to the far more serious types of cancer.  One other thing.  When I was in hospital after I had my radiation treatment, I was in the cancer ward.  There were people I knew who were never going to get out of there and for a long time, I asked myself, “Why them?  Why not me?”  Questions that have no answers, but I asked them, anyway.

BM: Chris, allow me to hit the rewind button and go back to your treatment.  You said this was a period that lasted about two months.  First of all, what was the toughest part of those two months?

CM: There was no real pain involved in the surgery, first getting the lump removed, then the thyroidectomy, I didn’t hurt at all.  It was the emotional thing of asking, “Am I going to live through this?” not the surgery per se, but is this going to come back?   What about in six months, will they find out there was something they missed, or is it going to hit another part of my body?  That was always with me, every single day throughout the whole thing, and it was very tough.  A lot of my colleagues at work didn’t know what I was going through, but my closest friends did.  They were very supportive and very helpful, but in my own private moments, I have to mention my wife, who was a rock through all of this, and family, too.  In my own private moments, I thought my life is never going to be the same.  It turned out, it was pretty much the same.

BM: I want to ask about a support system, which was the next thing I was going to ask, and you have already sort of answered it, but I want you to elaborate.  You said in terms of support, your wife was a rock.  What did she say or do that provided support to you?

CM: The day I was diagnosed with cancer she was working in downtown Toronto, and I was at work at Canadian Press.  I called her and I said, “I’ve got cancer.”  We did the expected crying on the phone, and my boss said I could take the rest of the day off and be with my wife.  We then met somewhere for lunch, and at that point, she was tremendously composed.  That’s when she said there was somebody at her job whose husband went through the same thing.  It was like ten years ago, and he’s fine.  She said she had done some research on it, which in 1994, with no Internet, wasn’t so easy, then put me in touch with the husband, who told me I, too, was going to be fine.  My wife is not an emotional person, she is stoic, while me, I am shifting sands, I wear my emotion on my sleeve and always have.  She was exactly what I needed then, and then, right through.  We have been married well into three decades now, and she was great.

BM: Beyond your wife, did support come from any other source? 

CM: My colleagues at work were great.  I don’t have a large family.  In fact, at this point, I have a second cousin and that’s the entire family on my side.  My mom was still alive, and she was living in London, Ontario at the time.  As an only child, she would treasure any time I would go there to visit.  My wife, Michelle, and I decided we were going to drive there that weekend after I was diagnosed and break the news to her in person.  Driving home the next day, we laughed so hard because my mom was just so happy to see me because I didn’t visit that often.  We laughed because we could have told her anything and it wouldn’t have fazed her.  She didn’t care.  She was just happy to see us.  I really don’t think it hit her until later, and I had to tell her what the doctors were telling me, that I was going to be just fine, but she was always very supportive.

BM: You had mentioned these constant seeds of doubt that perhaps were planted by yourself.  Was there a time when you overcame those seeds of doubt and felt you had the upper hand on cancer, and if so, how did that feel?

CM: I cannot put a date on when it eased.  When I became cancer free for five years, I threw a party, and maybe shortly thereafter I was thinking how I had been told my odds of this cancer returning are no greater than someone who has never had cancer.  Whether that was true or not, I don’t know, but that’s what they told me, and that’s what I hung on to.  Shortly after that I started feeling okay, life is back to normal, but never ever completely.  You know, we feel invincible, nothing can happen to us, this stuff happens to other people, but it did happen to you, and it happened to me, and it happened to so many others, but in the back of my mind, I realize I am not invincible.  But now that I am 68 years old, maybe it will be cancer, maybe it will be something else, but at least I knew I was not going to die in my forties, which was the big fear at the time.  I had only been married about ten years and I don’t want to go then, I am not ready now.  Even at this moment, I am not ready, but I certainly was not ready then. 

BM: We have talked about the mental and emotional component here, but from a physical standpoint, is there anything now that you cannot do because of your cancer journey, or are you able to do everything you could do, before the cancer journey?

CM: Physically, it didn’t affect me at all.  Obviously, it affected me emotionally, as we have discussed.  Physically, not a thing.  The only difference is, I don’t have a thyroid, which means I don’t have a thing in my body that almost balances things out.  I have to take medication for it.  I take medication at the same time each day, then you go in for checkups.  I have had, in the intervening years, a couple of times when they have had to adjust my medication.  But the thyroid is an amazing human instrument, and without it, emotional highs and lows can get a little out of control, when you are tired, whatever the thyroid produces to help you through that might not be replicated by a pill, so you are tired for longer or when you are excited and ready to go and running through walls, that feeling lasts a little longer, in my experience, anyway, so yeah, that’s the only physical thing, but it is nothing that keeps me from doing anything I want to do.

BM: You know, it kind of sounds like the thyroid is sort of a command center, for, if not for all things, almost all things physical, mental and emotional, all roads lead to the thyroid.  Is that fair to say?

CM: I think that’s probably true.  I suffer from depression now and I never did before my diagnosis.  I don’t know if it is related to not having a thyroid, but I have gone through all kinds of emotional highs and lows, very serious lows, and they are all since I have had my thyroid removed, and again, thanks to family, friends and medication, I am in a better place than I was, but I had panic attacks.  I swore after calling an ambulance on two or three occasions, I swore I was having a heart attack.  One of those instances took place when I was covering a curling event in Brandon, Manitoba in 1997.  They had to haul me by ambulance to the local hospital.  They checked me out and I was fine, but it was a panic attack, and I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.  They’re terrible.  You can take deep breaths and say, “It’s a panic attack, it’s a panic attack, you’re not having a heart attack,” but all the symptoms are there.  You’ve got the chest pains, you have got the sweats, all the things that indicate a heart attack, better not ignore it, but I have to say I am going to ignore because I know it is a panic attack and not a heart attack.  In the end, though, you still have to get it checked.  So, I went on medication to help with the panic attacks and that did help tremendously, and I have had one or two in the last two decades, but for a while, they were occurring very, very frequently.

BM: These panic attacks.  Are they worse physically, mentally or emotionally?

CM: I’d say all three.  I mean, the physical aspect of it is in my case, mirroring what are the very serious symptoms of a heart attack.  I had trouble breathing, I had severe chest pains, I was sweating like crazy, my arm was feeling kinda numb, and whether that is a mental thing, I don’t know, but they were very hard on my wife because three or four times I had to call an ambulance, and for nothing, and she said to me, “Look, I can’t go on like this, it’s driving me crazy,” and she is not one to show emotions.  So, I thought I better get this looked at because I really wasn’t doing anything about it at the time, so I told my doctor about the attacks.  He assigned me to a psychiatrist who put me on a very good medication to reduce the frequency, and the frequency went almost completely away.

BM: You know, Chris, your cancer journey, you have made it sound relatively uneventful compared to those of others, and yet your being proactive could have been a very big contributor to the relatively low amount of stress that came with it, so when you initially felt that lump, was there any indecision on your part about going in and having it checked because I can tell you with my type of cancer, with prostate cancer, a lot of men want to stick their head in the sand and they don’t want to get checked out because they are afraid of what they might hear.  Were you ever afraid of what you might hear when you first felt that lump?

CM: No, I wasn’t.  When I recognized there was a lump that morning, that night right after work I was into the clinic to see a doctor.  Again, that was the period in which I thought I was invincible.  I am traveling the world, I am seeing sports events, life could not be better.  So, after the diagnosis, then I was afraid.  After going through the journey of having cancer, having it diagnosed, having it treated, so after all that, I didn’t have a lump of that size again, I was almost afraid to get checked again for other cancers and it kinda like a mental thing.  I never want to go through that again.  I did of course because that is what you do, but there was a part of me that just didn’t want to know.

BM: Chris, we always start our interviews from the same place, and we try to end them from the same place.  Basically, we want to solicit a message from you if you had a private audience with somebody who has just been diagnosed with say, thyroid cancer and on the fence about getting checked.  But I would say in your case, because early detection was key, that your message, your answer to this final question is one that can cut across many lines and address many different types of cancer.  Very simply, if you had that private audience with someone who was in a position in which they detected something that might think is wrong, and they’re on the fence about going in and getting checked, what would be your message?

CM: Bruce, I would basically say that you’re not alone.  You might be thinking, ‘If I just ignore it, it will all go away.’  Then tomorrow, you might think the same thing.  But if you ignore it, it will always be there at the back of your mind.  So, if you go get tested, the odds are highly in your favor that you’re fine, that you don’t have it.  If you do, then the wheels start getting in motion to get you fixed.  The longer you put that off, if you do have cancer, that’s another day the cancer grows, or another week the cancer grows, or another month the cancer grows, or years.  You don’t wanna do that.  You want to have answers to your questions, even though you are afraid of what they might be.  There are two outcomes.  First of all, you’re cancer free.  The second is, okay, you have it and now, we take steps to get you fine again, and the earlier you can start taking those steps, the better chance you are going to be fine again faster.  Then there’s less damage to undo.  If you wait, there might be more damage to undo.  So, don’t wait.  Do it, even though there is a part of your mind that says you can’t.  Yeah, you can.  You CAN.  I did, I am 68, healthy and happy.  You will be, too.

BM: Chris, that’s a great wrapup to a wonderful story, and one that I hope will resonate with people.  Again, anyone who might be on the fence about being checked, if you’re on the fence, do yourself a favor and a favor for your loved ones by going in to get checked.  That’s gonna wrap it up, Chris, and thanks so much for sharing your story.  We really appreciate it, and I’m sure our viewers and listeners do, too. 

CM: My pleasure, Bruce, it’s always great to talk to you and I am honored you asked me to be part of this.

BM: Thanks so much, Chris.  That will do it for this segment of Cancer Interviews.  Until next time, we will see you on down the road.

SHOW NOTES

TITLE: Chris Mayberry, Papillary Thyroid Cancer Survivor – Stouffville, Ontario, Canada

Chris Mayberry is a survivor of Papillary Thyroid Cancer.  After noticing a lump in his neck while shaving, he had it checked out, which resulted in his diagnosis.  He underwent a thyroidectomy and two months of radiation treatment after which he went into remission.  Chris did suffer post-treatment panic attacks, but they have receded, and he leads a healthy and happy life.  Chris says his cancer journey was relatively uneventful because of early detection and urges anyone who thinks something may be abnormal to be proactive and seek medical attention.  He shares his story with the @CancerInterviews podcast.

Additional Resources:

Thyroid Cancer Survivors Association

https://www.thyca.org

Time Stamps:

08:00 Chris noticed a lump on his neck.

09:43 Was told he had papillary thyroid cancer.

12:10 Says compared to others diagnosed with cancer, he was lucky.

13:13 Describes his treatment, which included two months of radiation and a thyroidectomy.

18:57 Chris is asked his post-treatment doubts began to taper off.

22:14 Said he suffered post-treatment panic attacks.

29:03 His message to those diagnosed with cancer.

KEYWORDS (tags):

thyroid cancer

cancer

radiation treatment

cancer interviews

papillary thyroid cancer

cancerinterviews.com

thyroidectomy

bruce morton

panic attacks

chris mayberry