Bad news - then came the bitter regrets and devastation

Jun 27 2007 By Liverpool Daily Post

WITH four days to go before England’s workplaces are declared smoke free former Liverpool surgeon Ray Donnelly, who founded the Roy Castle Lung Cancer foundation, writes exclusively for the Daily Post.

DURING my time as a thoracic surgeon in Liverpool, I saw thousands of patients with lung cancer, and just about every one of them bitterly regretted the day they ever started smoking.

I have now been retired for several years, but I can still see in their eyes the devastation they felt inside when I told them the diagnosis.

No matter how kind and gentle I tried to be, at some stage I had to explain what was the problem and what I intended to do. I’ll never forget one patient saying to me that he felt the words "lung cancer" were the two most frightening words in the English language.

Fortunately there were a few to whom we could hold out the prospect of cure through surgery, but for the majority the outlook was bleak and for most smoking had been the prime cause of their desperate situation.

Seeing such suffering day after day, not just for the patients but also for their families, was what motivated me in 1990 to set up the Lung Cancer Fund, which would later be re-named the Roy Castle Lung Cancer Foundation.

Starting in my office at Broadgreen with absolutely nothing we have now become, from our base in Liverpool, a major player on the national and international stage in the fight against lung cancer, thanks to the efforts of many wonderful people, especially Roy Castle.

As a charity we have campaigned long and hard to raise awareness of the dangers of second hand smoke and to persuade governments to take effective action to protect us all from its debilitating, distressing, and at times lethal, consequences.

In 1991 I was invited to address the full city council on the problem of smoking in Liverpool. It was the start of something of huge importance and benefit to the people who live there and beyond.

I gave it to the councillors straight, without reference to my notes, for over half an hour. In those days it was amazing how ignorant supposedly informed people were, in spite of warnings from the Health Authority, about the prevalence of smoking related diseases in Liverpool, and how tobacco was killing one in five of its citizens every year.

At that time the council had an alcohol abuse working party and a drug abuse working party, but there was no concerted effort to do anything effective about smoking.

I persuaded them to set up a tobacco abuse working party and served on it, and the lung cancer fund provided funding so that the city could appoint a smoking prevention co-ordinator.

Soon after we began to fund what was then a very small and unknown local smoking cessation group called Fag Ends, and other related initiatives. Then came Roy Castle, and what an impact he made.