Roy’s Shire Border Dash
Shire Border Dash – Menai to Cronulla
Roy Amos, a bone marrow transplant survivor, will be embarking on a physical challenge Sunday 14th November 2021, walking 15 kilometres from Menai to Cronulla. Border to border of the Sutherland shire, this walk is longer than any Roy has embarked on prior to his diagnosis. With the help of his personal trainer, Roy is determined to complete this daunting challenge in the knowledge that the cause is worth the commitment.
Roy’s commitment to the challenge stems from his own experience and desire to “pay it forward” and improve the chances of the next person who has to fight the insidious disease of blood cancer.
In September 2017, Roy was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive blood cancer. A key part of his treatment was a bone marrow transplant which he received in February 2018. Roy considers himself to now be in a very lucky position. He credits his recovery to luck more than good management – luck that his disease was diagnosed at all, luck that the diagnosis prevented the disease from spreading deeper into his body, and luck that medical research has progressed so far over the years.
Roy recognises and appreciates that medical research has had a large part to play in his recovery. Without medical research the drugs that Roy received would not have been available and his prognosis would have been at best dire. Receiving bone marrow from his son would not have been an option, and the life saving bone marrow transplant would have been an unfathomable form of treatment. It is only with medical research that these treatments have been made possible, and ultimately Roy’s recovery.
Buoyed by these advancements in medical research Roy is keen to support further research into blood cancers. In particular, Roy’s treating doctor Professor David Ma, is working on a medical research project known as GAMBIT. This project’s aims include developing new diagnostic tests to enable early detection, if not prediction, of blood cancers as well as new targeted therapies. Early detection of blood cancer and better treatments will assist in reducing a patient’s reliance on ‘luck’. It will not just benefit blood cancers however – other blood disorders, autoimmune disorders, heart disease and stroke, and metabolic diseases like type 11 diabetes will also benefit.
If you would like to support Roy in his “Shire Boulder Dash” and his vision to predict and treat early the development of blood cancer, you can support him here: