WATCH: ‘It’s something I should never have survived’ says Inverness fuel tanker driver battling cancer
A former fuel tanker driver who crashed into empty shop premises after a seizure later found to be caused by the presence of a malignant brain tumour is one step closer to living cancer free as he started medical treatment that could potentially save his life.
Since the devastation of the crash, Steven Fry (32) and his family, from Inverness, have been in the race against time to raise substantial funds to go ahead with the treatment.
But, before the crash that turned his life upside down, Steven endured a variety of symptoms on a daily basis. He said: “About a year-and-a-half before the crash, I had major headaches, an aluminium taste, numbness to the right side of the body and I felt very drained.
“Eventually I asked for an MRI scan because I knew something was wrong.”
Around a week later Steven took a seizure while in his fuel tanker, which crashed into empty shop premises in the centre of Beauly in September 2021 and had to be airlifted to Raigmore Hospital in Inverness.
“It’s something I should never have survived,” he added.
After months of gruelling chemotherapy and radiotherapy, that had a dire knock-on effect on Steven’s mental and physical health, the family discovered that it wouldn’t cure his cancer, but add just 14 years to his expected lifespan.
However, just as Steven and his wife Chloe (29) thought all was lost they found out about a medical trial that had potential to save his life, but was going to cost the family a mammoth £50,000.
Over the past year, those in and around the Highlands have rallied around Steven and managed to fundraise almost £60,000 to get this Inverness dad the treatment he so desperately needs to watch his children grow up and have a future with his wife.
When talking about the importance of the fundraising, Chloe said: “Brain cancer only gets one per cent of funding from the national cancer research, so the treatment available is basically just chemotherapy and radiotherapy, which doesn’t shrink his tumour, it just stunts the growth of it.
“But with this new immunotherapy treatment it has the ability to shrink the tumour and in some cases get rid of it altogether.
“That’s why it’s so important to us as then it gives him as much of a chance as anyone else to live as long as possible and see his daughters grow up.
“The most important thing for us is for the girls to have their dad and we want him to be a part of everything.”
Steven added: “Hopefully I can have more of a life with my wife and kids than I was expecting to have because of the brain cancer, so I’m hopeful for it all.”
Despite having shown sheer determination to not only get through Steven’s cancer journey, also welcoming two little girls into the world during the process, Chloe feels she hasn’t quite ‘dealt with it’.
She said: “I don’t think I’ve dealt with it, I feel like I just buried it. Like, we will be having family days out and then I’ll suddenly think that in a couple years time maybe Steven won’t be here.
“Then I think of all the milestones that the girls will have and that there's a possibility that he might not be here. So, it’s bittersweet.
“I’m trying to be positive and hope that this treatment does work, but I guess at the back of my mind there’s the possibility that it might not.”
The former fuel tanker driver has now started his treatment cycle and is set to continue for the next 12 months, however the process is a lot less invasive on Steven’s body as it is a type of biological therapy, which uses substances made from living organisms to treat cancer.
As the family continues to travel back and forth to London for Steven’s immunotherapy, they try to keep positive as they see light at the end of the tunnel and look forward to a future that is cancer free.
