Author and broadcaster Manchán Magan has spoken about the worsening of his cancer and how he has been receiving treatment at St James’s Hospital for the past three weeks.
“This sort of cancer that I’ve been playing with for the last year and a half suddenly took a bout, a turn, and started spreading through [my body],” Mr Magan said.
“My brother plays a game. He says mention any limb in your body Manchán, and I bet you have cancer in it. So far, that seems to be [the case]. It’s in a bit of my lungs and my brain and my liver, etc, etc, etc.”
He was discussing his illness while speaking to Brendan O’Connor on RTÉ Radio 1 on Saturday.
As to whether he had been given a timescale on his illness, he said: “We might get a year or two, and we’ll definitely get another few months.”
Mr Magan was there to discuss his latest book, Ninety-Nine Words for Rain (and One for Sun). It is the latest project to emerge from what he described as a “cancer of creativity” over the last few years, sparking a series of books and TV shows about the Irish language and Irish culture.
“It’s only prostate cancer,” he said. “It’s like the easiest cancer. But there’s some rare, particular type of prostate cancer that’ll just devour you.
“They’re going to bring me a little bit of chemo and that works for about 50 or 60 per cent of cases. We did a bit of radio [therapy] for just pain. Mostly it’s in the bones, so it’ll be a fair amount of pain, so they give you palliative [care].”
[ Manchán Magan on living with cancer Opens in new window ]
He asked people “not to send me blessings and letters and weird mystery hopes or cures and things”. He said he was feeling good and pain-free on Saturday, probably due to the excitement of the radio appearance. Most days now, he explained, he cannot think or write, though he hopes and expects to complete another book currentlyin progress.
“It depends on the day,”he said of his pain levels. “For some reason, there hasn’t been much despair or there hasn’t been much ‘Why me? Why me?’ – I don’t know why. There’s a lot of pain, even despite all the oxycodone or whatever painkillers I’m on. Let’s say, the fact that it’ll be in my ribs or in my spine or in my pelvis, the bone pain is a kind of dull, thudding thing.”
He will be getting out of hospital in a few days, and lauded the efficiency of the medical staff caring for him. There was a chance that, a month from now, he might improve for a period, and he hoped to continue a long-held passion for travelling in the coming months.
“What I’d love to do – I want to go with my partner, to go to Ballymaloe, to go to Dromoland,” he said. “I’d love to have gone to Ethiopia with her again, but we probably won’t be going there. There’s some lovely trips we’d love to take and we will.”