Bloke who’d ‘never been sick’ given weeks to live after noticing strange symptom

2023-02-13

A bloke who said he had never had a sick day in his life was given “three weeks to live” after noticing a strange-coloured rash on his chest.

Harry Simpson, 27, was in the shower when he noticed "a couple of purple spots" on his chest last February. He "thought nothing of it" and spent the next two weeks on holiday in Dubai skydiving, riding jet skis and celebrating his birthday.

But later, the normally super-fit student of criminology and sociology started to notice something wrong.

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"I was really tired, just fatigued,” he told the Liverpool Echo. “I was going to the gym and I was out of breath, nowhere near as good as what I could be”.

Harry spoke to his GP about it, and they thought he may have picked up a bug while he was in Dubai.

“They gave me antibiotics to take for about two weeks,” he recalled. “I thought I must be alright, so I … climbed the highest mountain in Ireland.

"I had to stop 20 times going up that mountain and I was like, 'Something really isn't right’,” Harry say.

“I could literally feel my heart going mad in my chest, like really pumping. And I could feel it in my arteries, down my neck, and my lymph nodes had swollen up on one side. I just couldn't breathe, I was just struggling to breathe.”

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His GP sent him for blood tests, and after a day of colleagues saying he'd lost weight and gone white, Harry realised he had "10 missed calls from different consultants". They'd managed to get through to his mum who called Harry "in a wee bit of a panic" telling him to call the hospital.

Despite this, Harry still "thought there was nothing wrong”.

"I just could never think I would be sick. I've never been sick in my life with anything small, I don't get colds. I've never really been sick at all, so I just didn't expect anything. I was just expecting something silly that needs to be sorted out.”

But in fact, doctors discovered, he was suffering from potentially deadly T-cell precursor acute lymphoblastic leukaemia.

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The cancer had had spread to his skin, which is what was causing the purple spots, and he was told he could have "maximum three weeks left" to live.

Harry said: "I just sat and cried. My granny was sitting there and she was upset, and my dad was trying to be a bit of strength for me."

Fortunately, after a gruelling six-month stay in hospital, undergoing "intensive chemotherapy" to "destroy his whole body" Harry received a stem cell transplant of donor tissue from his sister.

The effects of the treatment left him lying in a dark room on morphine for 24 hours a day, being fed through a tube because it was too painful to eat or drink.

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Harry lost over two stone in five weeks and his condition was so bad his clinicians considered calling his family in. Harry said: "They didn't think I was going to make it, but thankfully a few days after, I started getting slightly better again.”

Two days before Christmas, Harry was finally told there was no sign of the cancer in his latest bone marrow test, the first time this has happened since he was diagnosed. He and his family were ecstatic, but he's at high risk of the cancer returning, and the treatment he's had to clear it have increased the chances of him developing secondary cancer.

He still goes for weekly check-ups and takes medication to keep the cancer at bay, but he was able to go go-karting for his 27th birthday this Saturday after a year of barely any socialising. Harry said: "I take every single day as a new challenge.

"Every night when I'm going to bed, I just take a minute or two to be thankful for something I've done during the day, and I go to sleep and I'm happy. Then when I wake up, I wake up happy because here's another day."

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