Marathon challenge to lung cancer

February 9 2016

What makes a 51-year-old with an arthritic knee want to run the London Marathon? A good question indeed – and one which Greater London Combined (GLC) branch assistant secretary Jeff Till has been asking himself almost daily when, come rain or shine, he sets off on his crack-of-dawn training session in preparation for the daunting 26-mile challenge he’ll face on April 24. Yet, despite freely admitting he won’t be sorry when his self-inflicted torture is over, Jeff is a man with a mission – to raise desperately needed cash to help fund the British Lung Foundation’s quest to save and improve the lives of people with lung cancer.

The motivation for Jeff is personal because, in 2014, the CWU’s London area Openreach SPOC (single point of contact) lost his sister-in-law Ann – a life-long non-smoker – to lung cancer. That family tragedy opened Jeff’s eyes to the chronic underfunding research of the biggest killing cancer in the UK.

While new treatments have markedly improved average survival rates associated with many other cancer types in recent decades, the prognosis for lung cancer sufferers has stubbornly remained pretty much unchanged in 40 years.

“It’s known as the Cinderella’ cancer/ charity and not without good reason,” Jeff explains. “Campaigns about lung cancer are too obviously linked to the causative factor of smoking – and there appears to be a general underlying and unspoken opinion that it is regretfully somehow self-inflicted and therefore less worthy of research because of the mistaken view that it could be eradicated overnight if only people stopped smoking.
“If only life was ever that simple. Research tells us that of the approximately 44,000 lung cancer patients diagnosed every year in the UK, at least 10-15% have never smoked.”

The extent to which the quest to find new ways of combatting lung cancer is lagging is illustrated by the fact that, in terms of death per case, £7,000 is spent on research for every person who dies of leukaemia, £3,500 for every person who dies of breast cancer yet only £400 for every lung cancer victim – despite the fact that more die from lung cancer each year than from breast cancer, bowel cancer and leukaemia combined.”
Jeff is determined to do his bit to help improve that statistic – setting an ambitious target to raise £2,000 in sponsorship for the British Lung Foundation by completing the London Marathon.

“The training is really taking it out of me – it’s the first time I’ve ever done the Marathon and it will certainly be the last -but then I think of my sister-in-law and that sort of gets me going,” he said.

Jeff Till pictured at Olympic Stadium

“The other thing that really helps is thinking about the people who are donating. I find that really humbling and motivating, because it reminds me why I’m doing this.”
Perhaps the most poignant reminder of all, however, were some words Ann wrote shortly before she died in which she looked forward to a better prognosis for future lung cancer victims.
“I pray things will change for lung cancer sufferers someday,” she wrote. “I pray that research funders and the public as a whole will wake up and smell the coffee’. It might be too late for me, but perhaps not for those that come after me.”

To support Jeff in his fundraising visit his just giving’ page