Clapham woman Sue Harte is gearing up for the London Marathon next month when she will run in memory of her late husband, Damien, who tragically passed away from sarcoma – a rare form of cancer.
Sue, a 64-year-old retired social worker who started her training on Clapham Common, is raising funds for Sarcoma UK. Sue was devastated when “the love of her life”, her husband for 40 years, Damien, died from sarcoma. Sarcomas are so rare they account for less than 1% of all cancer diagnoses.
The first sign that something was wrong with Damien’s health came in May 2018 when the couple were visiting Marrakesh in Morocco. Having climbed Mount Toubkal, they celebrated after their descent with champagne. Damien then complained of a pain in his side, which at the time seemed like a pulled muscle.
When the couple returned to England, Damien, who was still in pain, decided to have it checked out and was initially told by medics that he had a hematoma or sarcoma. The pain was then accompanied by some alarming swelling on Damien’s side. Tests and biopsies ruled out sarcoma but the lump on Damien’s side continued to grow and became unbearably painful, one option he was given was to live with it.
At Damien’s request, surgeons operated in October 2018. The “hematoma” was an 18 cm diameter tumour. Damien was told the tumour was a grade 3 myxofibrosarcoma, a type of soft tissue sarcoma cancer. There are only 178 cases of myxofibrosarcoma in England each year.
Following the surgery, Damien had successful radiotherapy only for the cancer to return in his side exactly one year later in 2019. In November 2019, the cancer spread to Damien’s lungs. Despite this, Damien and Sue remained active.
Sue said: “In February 2020, we travelled to Oman to hike in the Jebal Akhdar mountains. We hiked 2,000ft into a canyon and back up again. While I was almost on my hands and knees, Damien breezed it – he was fit as a fiddle. The cancer had metastasized at this point and astonishingly he hiked with SEVEN tumours in his lungs.”
After this trip, and just as the UK was going into the first Covid lockdown, Damien went into hospital for treatment. Due to Covid restrictions, he had to spend 39 days in hospital by himself.
By June 2020, he was unable to walk due to tumours on his spine. He needed two operations – given the location of the tumours, he was warned the surgery could leave him paralysed.
He had more radiotherapy and this time Sue slept on the floor of his hospital room for three weeks to keep Damien company. In August 2020, he was told that it was unlikely he would be able to regain the use of his legs, and he now had pneumonia.
Damien decided that he wanted no further treatment and returned home. He died on 21 September 2020 aged 64. As well as Sue, he left a son, Conor, and daughter, Maeve. Maeve has since had a son Fabian whose middle name is Damo (Damien’s nickname).
Reflecting on the time it took Damien to be diagnosed, Sue said: “Had he been diagnosed earlier, he might have lived longer.” She added: “He had great joie de vivre, he faced his cancer journey with courage, bravery and humour and selflessness.”
The family were originally from Portlaoise in Ireland and moved to England in 1983. They went to the US in 1986 when Damien attended the University of Chicago to study for a Masters of Business Administration before returning to the UK.
A chief financial officer, Damien helped launch the TV station Channel 5 and had worked in industries including the wind energy and logistics sectors. He was passionate about food poverty and was a trustee of food charity FareShare.
Sue is running for charity Sarcoma UK in the London Marathon on 27 April to help raise awareness and funds to fight the disease. She said: “I am now Damien’s age when he died and he always wanted to run a marathon, I’m not a runner but in a fit of the vapours one evening I decided to apply to run on the Sarcoma UK team and they accepted me! Taking part in the London Marathon will be an enormous challenge for me and great big ‘up yours’ to the sepsis I survived in 2023.”
Sarcoma UK’s Director of Research, Policy and Support, Dr Sorrel Bickley, said: “We’re incredibly grateful to Sue for taking on this challenge in memory of Damien. At Sarcoma UK, we’ve invested over £4M across 50 different research studies to help people with soft tissue sarcomas. Our researchers are working on better ways to spot sarcoma earlier, understand why treatments sometimes stop working and develop new therapies that could save lives. Unfortunately, soft tissue sarcomas are often diagnosed too late because they are so rare and can be mistaken for other conditions. Sue’s fundraising will help us continue this vital research and hopefully prevent other families from experiencing the heartbreak that she and her family have endured.”
To donate to Sue, go to https://www.justgiving.com/page/sue-harte?utm_medium=FR&utm_source=CL
