My Friend Neil..

I'm not quite sure how to write this but I got one of those phone calls earlier this evening that you never want to get – which was about one of the good friends I have made through Myeloma, and a friend too of Lou Rutter/Fletcher - Neil Atterson.

Neil's girlfriend Liz rang me to say that very sadly, his myeloma had escalated over the past couple of months and that despite lots of treatment, his body had hit its limit and he has died.

The call went in a total blur for me as while I knew that Neil had been up against it recently – he was meant to be going into Kings in August for a (high risk but with potential reward) unrelated donor stem cell transplant but was released after several days as he wasn't well enough for it – he'd asked Liz to keep this quiet from me so I wouldn't worry.

So the details aren't quite clear right now, but the long and the short of it seems to have been that he'd had various treatments which didn't work as well as hoped for, he'd gone into Kings, then – as Myeloma tends to do – his kidneys had failed, he'd picked up an infection via his Hickman line, and various other things had just gone plain wrong…. and here we are.

Neil for me was a bit like having a slightly older brother in Myeloma – one who'd been diagnosed 4 years ago and hugely coincidentally was both the boyfriend of one of my university friend's good friends and treated by the same Prof as me. So he knew the Myeloma ropes and spent hours with me, at the time recently diagnosed and hugely shell shocked in my living room, explaining his own story, treatments, terminology, how to deal with Prof, other myeloma experts across the country he'd come into contact with, doing things with and for Myeloma UK, whether I could ever expect to feel better or have a holiday again, what he'd experienced, what I might expect and equally how myeloma can differ for everyone…

He was a fairly quietly spoken Scottish guy, who'd made some good decisions about giving up work, staying fit, travelling where possible, to give himself the best chance to get the most from life and his relationship with Liz, and had a really positive attitude about the possibilities of the Allo, which he hoped to go back in for in a month or two when the docs had stabilised his condition. Just such an enormous shame that he didn't get as far as having it and getting a better crack at more time.

Am so sorry to have to write this, above all given what it's meant for Neil. But its important to me to somehow mark this nice, normal, friendly, supportive, possibility-seeking guy, who could have been any single one of us. He was a lovely guy who struggled hard against this aggressive active disease, having the rotten ups and downs that treatment and steroids entailed, sharing his experience and support even when he was up against it. His leaving this world when he was the same age as me is such an unfair shame that there aren't really words for it.

Here's to Neil.

Scotty.