District court judge ChrisMcGuire is back runningand swimming. PHOTO/STEPHEN PARKER
As a judge, Chris McGuire's job is to impose sentences. In this Our People special he talks of the sentence cancer and the ghastly side effects its treatment imposed on him.
AN IRONMAN with an iron will, his killer instinct honed as a member of the crack SAS fighting squad, Chris McGuire is not someone to be messed with.
So when cancer lobbed several grenades his way he was seemingly battle-ready, primed to pull the pin on the multiple tumours that invaded his body.
It is a war he has all but won (no medical man is brave enough to say he is 100 per cent cured) but just short of a year after colorectal cancer was found deep in his bowel, he is back on the Rotorua District Court bench, and running and swimming daily.
Some will say it was his supreme fitness that made him so well so quickly.
While Chris accepts it helped, he gives equal credit to "superb" medical specialists, the support of his "extraordinary" wife Heather, the "man upstairs" and massive doses of Vitamin C.
Today he feels, to quote him, "great".
"I keep pinching myself, there were times when I was really, really low; truly awful," he says.
The reality is it wasn't cancer which made him so ill but the series of hideous side-effects it triggered. Apart from more frequent bathroom visits, maybe the occasional spot of blood, Chris had no indication his body was harbouring potentially fatal time bombs.
When he swung by his GP for a check-up he was feeling his usual robust self. His GP ran some tests thinking, perhaps, Chris had a touch of giardia. He didn't. A precautionary colonoscopy was next on the agenda. Chris was chipper-until he woke up and saw Heather looking anxious.
"Then David Griffiths [Rotorua surgeon] came in and said 'you have quite a large colorectal tumour', he was afraid it had breached the bowel wall, ordered a CAT scan."
That was September 22 last year, that evening the surgeon arrived at the McGuires' home with news neither he nor they wanted: the scan had revealed a certain amount of Chris' lymph nodes were cancerous and his liver was harbouring five tumours-one in its left side, four in the right.
"He had this very long face, said 'I am in the business of fixing people but I can't fix this'."
Grave as it sounded, Chris didn't regard it as the ultimate body blow.
"We thanked him for coming around, gave him a couple of bottles of wine and got on the phone to my cousin in Auckland, a cardiologist who's a pancreatic cancer survivor; he encouraged David to refer me to his carers, we weren't sure whether the aim was curative or palliative."
The next morning the McGuires were Auckland-bound to meet oncologist Professor Mike Finlay; colorectal surgeon Arend Merrie and the man Chris calls "the magician", liver surgeon Adam Bartlett, were next on their calling card. An MRI scan confirmed the previous findings but the good news was his cancer hadn't spread behind his liver- Chris remained his optimistic self.
Before surgery he needed a good dose of chemotherapy, this included walking around for two days with a bottle of chemo agents dripping through a catheter into his body.
Enter setback number one: "I didn't cope well with the second round, had a major allergic reaction . . . a full body rash, racing heart, raised temperature; was admitted to Auckland Hospital's A&E."
At an out-of-town conference, Adam Bartlett was called in the early hours of the morning.
"They wanted to unplug me, he advised steroid treatment because the chemo would finish the next day."
Despite further steroids to prepare him for the third round, Chris still responded badly. Chemo was stopped, he was rescanned, his tumours remained but he had to wait for his system to be chemo-free before he could be operated on. All went well, the bowel and left liver tumours were extracted but setback three was preparing to pounce. A line running into his back became twisted, bleeping non-stop for 48 hours.
"They couldn't find what was causing the alarm to sound, I couldn't sleep, by the time it was sorted I was absolutely trashed, exhausted. "I thought, 'how ironic I come out of this operation one of the fittest guys around but an alarm's left me poleaxed, I just wanted out of there [Mercy Hospital], persuaded Adam I was good to go."
Within hours he was in excruciating pain and back at A&E. "The worst 48 hours of my life
followed, worse then SAS training, I'd caught an infection, a hospital bug, I was streaming from all orifices, vomiting bile."
A nasal tube was essential to drain his stomach contents, Chris simply couldn't swallow i -"blokes are wimps, it would be easy for a woman".
By the third attempt at inserting it Chris had turned to a higher being. "I said to the man upstairs, 'you have got to help me do this' and this wonderful nurse got it in."
Chris counted off the following 24 hours in 10-second segments.
"I practised my best yoga breathing to control the gag reflex, my eyes tightly shut, I was itching to tear this thing out."
At his lowest ebb he met "an angel", a Samoan nurse who slipped in and out of his room to sing to him.
"She really did have the voice of an angel."
Unable to talk, Chris indicated he wanted a notebook.
"I left Heather instructions if my body started to shut down to get them to try high doses of Vitamin C, I'd read it could be beneficial treating infections, I wasn't going out without a fight."
Chris rallied, the nasal tube was removed, his next operation scheduled for January 19.
"I thought I'm going to get really, really well for it, took four or five times the usual dose of Vitamin C to get my immune system into some reasonable sort of order."
Between Christmas and New Year the McGuires came home, went to the movies where Chris caught a cold. He upped his Vitamin C intake to 15 times the recommended daily dose. Such a radical input had worked for him previously-when he developed flu on the eve of representing New Zealand at Hawaii's Kona Ironman.
"It worked then and it knocked this cold on the head, I didn't get pneumonia."
As Adam Bartlett prepared him for round two of surgery, he warned his patient he would lose even more weight (never a big bloke, he was down to 55kg) and probably turn yellow. Despite the removal of much of his liver's right lobe, he didn't do either. However, making it to the operating table was not incident-free. Three days before it was scheduled, he was back in A&E-this time on home turf- suffering severe abdominal pain.
"Yet again a doctor was calling Adam at 2am, Heather talked to him too, he said, 'don't let them cut Chris open'. He was right to be cautious, it was an adhesion that unkinked itself.
"The second op went brilliantly, I had no reason to think it wouldn't, I had all these good people praying for me, the good Lord stepped in for me a couple of times."
Despite a stomach looking like "a map of the London Underground" Chris has, by his evaluation "healed pretty well", his hated colostomy bag has bitten the dust.
"I was scanned in July after the last chemo round, a handful of cancer cells remained but 99 per cent of them were dead."
While he accepts he eventually responded well to chemo, he doesn't discount his self administered Vitamin C played a role. But he is anxious he is not seen as advocating it is the be-all and end-all of cancer treatment.
"It's been accepted by four conventional cancer clinics in the US that it has a part to play in treating rectal cancer, Professor Margaret Vissers' work at Otago University suggests the same. "I continue to take massive doses trying to keep my immune system in pristine order."
Is he cured?
"The medical view is I have a 50-60 per cent chance of that as of now, if I remain tumour free for 12 months then the odds go up to 80 per cent. "I think I'm really, really well, have been cured, but the cold, hard anatomical realities are there are probably still lots of cancer cells in my bloodstream and I'll continue to fight them."
And, yes, after many hiccups there is something to celebrate. His battered liver is regenerating and has stood up well to a "test drive"-a glass of wine.