Martyn Dipper

In September 2021, I was sitting in a car outside a hospital having just been told I had T4 throat cancer. The tumour was too large to operate on. Within weeks I was offered a place on TORPEdO — the first clinical trial in the UK to study Proton Beam Therapy for throat cancer — at The Christie in Manchester, over 180 miles from my home in Wiltshire.

Not everyone who applied would get it. I wanted it more than I had ever wanted anything.

I spent six and a half weeks there, largely alone, over Christmas and New Year — coming home for just two days at Christmas, a frantic rail journey each way, before heading straight back to continue treatment. Six and a half weeks of Proton Beam Therapy, a feeding tube I had been terrified of, taste changes, fatigue, and a voice that at one point almost disappeared entirely. For the final three weeks, due to a COVID scare on the ward, I was in isolation as a precautionary measure — the hospital's standard protocol at the time. On my final day of treatment, the team couldn't bring me to the bell in the waiting area, so they produced a hand bell so I could ring it in the isolation room. It was, they told me, the first time they had used one.

What carried me through wasn't luck or exceptional courage. It was preparation. I visited The Christie in November before treatment began — walking the route, meeting the team, understanding the machine. I built a small circle of people around me who knew their role. Before Christmas I counted the sessions up — building toward the halfway point. After Christmas I counted them down, watching the number get smaller every day until there was nothing left to count. And when things went wrong — the machine breaking down six sessions from the end — the team moved into weekend treatment and doubled up on one day to make sure I still crossed the finish line on time. The route changed, but the destination didn't.

Eighteen months later, I set out to swim the equivalent of the English Channel distance — 21 miles — in a twenty-five metre pool, one hour a day, Monday to Friday. I ended up swimming a marathon. 26 miles. I hadn't planned to stop at 21.

Four years on, I am clear. The monitoring continues, but I am here.

After treatment, my trials nurse Yuko asked me what had made me successful in completing the trial when others on the same trial hadn't. I spent four years thinking about that question — and eventually decided that a book would be the most appropriate way to answer it fully. Unmasked: Cancer, a Clinical Trial, and the Mindset That Got Me Through It has a foreword from Dr Emma de Winton, Consultant Oncologist at Royal United Hospitals Bath, and has been reviewed for clinical accuracy by the R&D team at RUH Bath.

If you are facing a head and neck cancer diagnosis, or supporting someone who is, I hope something in this story helps. The tools you need are already in you, built from everything you've already been through.

Unmasked is available on Amazon in Kindle, paperback and hardback.