A cancer-ridden dad who was given just eight months to live has been cured by a ‘miracle drug’.
Sean Guinness, 60, was told he’d be dead within the year after being handed a terminal diagnosis in 2018, but now plans to walk his daughter down the aisle on her wedding day.
Sean said he feels like the ‘luckiest man in the world’ after doctors used ‘cutting edge’ immunotherapy medication to reverse his terminal diagnosis.
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The government IT specialist was first treated for early stage skin cancer back in 2011 and was given a 92% chance of survival.
But in the spring of 2018, surgeons found a tumour had burst in his small intestine and diagnosed him with stage 4 metastatic melanoma.
The married dad-of-two then got the crushing news that he had just eight months to live as the disease had spread to his liver and gall bladder.
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But, despite his dire situation, doctors didn’t give up on Sean, and provided him with drugs including nivolumab and ipilimumab that can help find and kill cancer cells.
Within months, scans showed that the disease was in retreat – and remarkably, four years on, specialists declared him ‘cancer clear’.
Sean now plans to live out his middle-aged ‘dream’ of giving his daughter away at her wedding in August, with services planned for the UK and Spain.
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The doting dad said: “I feel like the luckiest man in the world. I don’t want to win anything. I don’t want to win the pools. I don’t want to win the lottery - I feel like I’ve won the lottery many times over.”
He added: “I’m very close to my daughter, and to be able to walk her down the aisle and to give her away at her wedding day - it’s the things that you dream of in middle age.”
Sean said he went into ‘survival mode’ after finding out he had less than a year to live.
He explained: “We don’t generally work in such short terms to live, but you start going into survival mode, which tends to be a mixture of anger, despair, numbness.
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“I was a happily married man with two beautiful children, one going through university, a 20 year-old, one out of university, a 24 year-old.
“I was ready for living the happy life because my wife and I had brought up a family together. And then suddenly, it felt like everything I’d worked for was being taken away from me very sharply.”
When Sean received the news that his tumours had started to shrink after just three months into the two-year course, he was ‘elated’.
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“I know of people who started and then could only get through the first month and their bodies just rejected it and they subsequently died,” he shared.
“But those that have been successful with it would definitely call it a miracle drug.”
Aisha Nozari