McPhail moving forward and crushing cancer

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This article was published 21/08/2019 (2417 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WASAGAMING — Cancer will not stop Andrew McPhail. No matter what, he keeps looking forward.

The 30-year-old admits it has been incredibly hard at times, however, since he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma in November 2017. The disease has left him bedridden at times, but through all of that, he was still more focused on how others were doing than his own struggle.

“For me, I really believe it’s harder on the people around me who love me than it is on myself. For me it’s only as bad as it is, but when you’re watching somebody go through it they just amplify it in their minds,” McPhail said while volunteering as a forecaddie at the Tamarack golf tournament on Tuesday.

“When things are really bad, you’re just sort of a brain-dead blob whereas everybody else is trying to go out and live their lives.”

The former Brandonite, who went to school at the University of British Columbia and did post-graduate work in Toronto, underwent six months of chemotherapy soon after his diagnosis, and things looked to be clear.

As is often the case, the cancer came back stronger in October 2018.

“That’s when they threw everything and the kitchen sink at me. It was high-intensity chemo, stem-cell transplant, a month in the hospital on the isolation ward. Pretty much the whole gamut at that point,” McPhail said. “There’s one step and you think it’s done, then a surprise. Hopefully this time it’s actually done.”

His scans have been clear for a while now. So he’s still doing maintenance chemotherapy to ensure it stays that way. He says that’s still inconvenient, but a “cakewalk” compared to the previous sessions.

So things are looking up for him and his wife, Amanda, and at a perfect time. The couple, who both work as orthotists — designing custom orthopedic braces and orthotics — had planned to start a family before the cancer hit, and were advised to freeze sperm before treatments started. They listened, but thought it would take longer for the process to work.

Now Amanda is 19 weeks pregnant with twins. The thought of children coming within the year has certainly impacted McPhail’s mindset about everything he has gone through the past two years.

“The whole time, it’s been about trying to look forward and to not think about what I’ve been through or necessarily what I’m going through,” he said. “Now with twins on the way, everything is about the future. I genuinely forget about cancer for two weeks. When it’s time to go back in for chemo it’s like ‘Damn it, got to do that again? OK, fine.’ Then it’s back to it.”

Tamarack week is one of those weeks where many get to forget about everything else and connect with friends and family from far and wide, but there are few families that have quite the same attachment to it than the McPhails. Andrew is grateful to be able to play again this year. He won the consolation side of the 13th flight last year and is back in the same consolation quarterfinals today.

With his parents living in Onanole now, he has strong orders to come back every August.

“My mom always said if you can’t make it back for Christmas, that’s fine. If you can’t make it back for Thanksgiving, that’s fine. You cannot miss Tamarack week.”

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