Father of two young girls - aged 1 and 6 years - Jonathan Malone, 39, from Arklow is battling a very serious condition known as sarcoma. However, his prognosis is facing uncertainty as the the specialist treating him at St Vincent's Hospital leaves her job tomorrow, Thursday.
By Brian Canty
A well-known family in the Irish cycling community are calling on the public to sign a petition which they believe could help save the life of their son who is battling a very rare form of cancer.
Father of two Johnathan Malone, 39, from Arklow has been fighting a condition known as sarcoma for two and a half years and is at a critical stage of his treatment, which involves both radiography and chemotherapy.
However, the specialist administering his treatment at St Vincent's Hospital is not having her contract renewed.
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Dr Alexia Bertuzzi is one of the few doctors in Europe with the expertise to treat the disease which is an over-arching term for 30 individual manifestations.
She had been working at the Dublin-based hospital for the past four years on a locum basis but her contract expired today, Thursday.
Jonathan’s father John - who runs the Newbridge GP, Paddy Flanagan Memorial and a string of other bike races - says the news comes as a “massive shock” and is detrimental to the lives of the 250 or so sufferers in Ireland.
“Dr Bertuzzi took him under her wing along with several others a couple of years ago; she’s one of Europe’s specialists in sarcoma.
“She had a skill to treat it, it’s not curable but it’s controllable and she put a plan into action which dealt with it through radiography and chemo.
“But she got an email a couple of weeks back from the CEO of Vincents to say her contract was up tomorrow.
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“There’s no expert to take over and the line coming out is that ‘patients will not be compromised’ but the people taking over are not specialists in sarcoma. That’s been a massive shock to the patients,” Malone senior explained.
Jonathan was a keen cyclist who rode a number of Rásanna and ironically, it was a fall from a mountain bike in 2013 that first brought the disease to his attention.
“He fell two and a half years ago and got a bad bruising in his thigh,” explained John.
“He went to get it checked out it wasn’t responding to physio so he went for a scan and discovered it wasn’t a haematoma at all.
“In St Luke’s they applied radiotherapy to shrink it and then remove it but six months later all of a sudden it appeared in his lungs.
“That’s when he was passed over to Dr Bertuzzi and she took him into her care and her care has kept him alive.”
A petition to keep Dr. Bertuzzi at the hospital has almost reached 15,000 signatures and tomorrow, there’s a protest scheduled for the hospital at 12.45pm.
Malone is encouraging any of the cycling public in the area to come along and show some moral support.
“If anyone is out for a spin tomorrow, they might spin to St Vincent’s to show their support, we’d welcome that.
“There will be people campaigning to keep her, the parents and relatives of the people affected by this decision will all be there because the loss of her is detrimental to the livelihood of these patients.”
Those looking to sign the petition can do so here.
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