This Teenage Cancer Survivor Is Running for MP to Save the NHS in Memory of His Lost Friends

Twenty-six-year-old cancer survivor John Lamport stands in contrast to a world of politicians whose insincere attempts to be everything to everyone make them nothing to anyone. John is standing in this year's General Election, seemingly motivated by lived experience, rather than some Oxbridge-incubated born-to-rule complex. It's a shame that the experience he went through was so horrific.

At 16, he was diagnosed with testicular cancer, which led to nine months of gruelling chemo. He survived, but the effects were lasting. He can no longer feel his hands or feet and his lungs are, he tells me, "knackered", meaning the former national hurdles champion can't run any more.

The medical support he received motivated him to become a doctor, studying hard for his A-levels while still being treated in hospital. And through being a doctor, he has witnessed first-hand what he sees as disastrous changes being made to the NHS. That, in turn, led him to join the National Health Action Party, which launched in 2012 in protest at the top-down restructuring of the NHS. He is seeking the support of the voters of Nottingham East in May.

I talked to him about surviving cancer, NHS privatisation and how he doesn't buy it when David Cameron talks about his disabled son, Ivan, who died in 2009 and was cared for by the NHS, as proof that he cares deeply about the health service.

VICE: Hi John. What year was it you were diagnosed with cancer?
John: It was 2005.

So how old were you?
I would have been 16; I was a national hurdles champion at the time but that had to stop.

How did you react when you were diagnosed?
Well, obviously you become very upset. You think you're going to die. And you go through the process of saying goodbye to people, because you don't know how long you're going to live, or whatever. Your family come to see you, which is a good thing, in a way. But you know, it's terrifying. And at 16, it does change the way you see the world and you carry that with you.

Were you given a good chance of survival at first, or not really?
Testicular cancer has a high survival rate, but there are too types. I had a much more aggressive type. And once it moves on – once it metastasises, you know – it normally goes to lungs or bones, then it's almost certain that you're going to die if you don't have your operation in time, which is why it was fairly critical that I got treatment when I did.

How did it change your life at the time?
It kept me off school for a year. It kept me away from my family because I was in the hospital all the time. When you're a young lad and you've got lots of hair and you're meeting girls and then you lose six stone in a year – which I did, which was horrifying – and you can't walk up the stairs any more and all your hair falls out and you go all wizened and gaunt, then you feel like you're not the same person.

You feel cut off from your community, because you can't go out and spend time with them, which is why it was so important that I made friends in the hospital, because we were cut off. People can't always come and see you. So that's why it was them passing away that affected me the most. You know, it takes time to get back in to the world, so you really have to find a purpose for living, because when you're told you're going to die, it's actually just as much of a shock to find out you're going to live again.

Can you tell me about the friends you made on the ward?
Yes. It was me and five other lads, we were all young, I was the youngest, but the oldest of them was 24 when he died. And of course you go through the process every birthday of realising you've outlived your friends and there's a lot of guilt with that and that takes a lot of time to get over. You do think, 'Why did I live and them not?' which you never recover from. You've just got to find good things to do in the world – like being a doctor and making people better or going in to politics and protecting hospitals – to justify the fact that you're alive. You can't help but feel that if you survive and someone else dies then you've taken something from them. It's a tricky thing to talk about sometimes.

Of course. Speaking of how lived experience affects politics, David Cameron has talked about his passion for the NHS because of his disabled son, who the service cared for before he died. What do you think when you hear that?
I have all the sympathy for anybody who's got a disabled child who's passed away, but we see lots of people like that on the ward and you can't excuse somebody damaging their prospects. You can't excuse a politician for bringing in reforms that are going to bring so much hurt and pain and waste so many lives because he's had personal problems. I wish it hadn't happened to him but I've still got to oppose him because he's doing worse things to other people.

Do you think he's being sincere?
About his son, yes. About the NHS, no.

No?
No. I don't think he's sincere. To back the top-down NHS reform that he brought in that backs privatisation and makes everything less efficient you've either got to be thoroughly incompetent, to think that that's going to make things better, or you've got to have other motives. And it's what growing up in Nottingham we'd probably call a "fib".

So you don't buy it? And you don't think he just has different beliefs about what would make the NHS better?
I don't buy it. I think he's had a bad experience himself with his children, but I don't think he's pro-NHS. I think he's damaging it and I think it's a weak politician who hides behind his family. I've got family who've got illnesses, I'm not hiding behind them, I'm not bringing them into it. I probably just have – I wish I hadn't.

The need to do something good – is that what caused you to become a doctor when you got better?
Yeah, well, it was watching all the staff caring for me and my friends for so long that made me want to be one of them. I didn't want to join the NHS so I could be a doctor, I wanted to be a doctor so I could join the NHS – to repay back to the community what the NHS had done for me. But also I wanted to stop other people like my friends dying – I wanted to be the doctor that could make the difference to them.

What was it like studying for A-levels while you were on the ward?
My teachers were good, they used to send me work that I used to sit and do in the ward when I was able to sit up and read properly, but it wasn't too hard. It gave me something to aim for, and if you're doing you're A-level studies, it is symbolic that you are expecting to live, even if the evidence is against you. So it was in optimism. But going back to the same year meant that I could reconnect with the same classmates and I felt that I'd sort of come back in to my old community.

You had nine months of chemotherapy. Can you tell me about that?
All chemos are different for everybody. They give you a cocktail of drugs; mine were vicious ones called Bleomycin, Cisplatin and Etopiside. Bleomycin makes your hair fall out and it gives you rashes all over your body and it kills off the lining of your throat so you get ulcers all down your oesophagus, so you can't swallow without pain. They tend to weep and sometimes they get infected, but you've got no immune system, because the Etopiside kills off your immune system and the Cisplatin ruins your kidneys and your lungs all scar up. Your heart doesn't work as well – I can't feel my hands or my feet any more because it kills off your nerves.

Even today?
Yeah, yeah. So that's lasting. My lungs are knackered so I can't really run much any more. I can't feel my feet so I'd fall over if I tried, and you know, even at medical school, not being able to feel your hands is a problem. I learned to take people's pulses with my wrist because you can't feel it in your fingers. But the worst thing is the being up all night vomiting because the chemo goes straight in to your veins and it makes you throw up, and to try to support your kidneys you have fluid constantly going through. So for days at a time I'd hardly sleep. And of course, I wasn't eating much for those nine months, so every time you get an infection, you feel like you're doing well and then everybody thinks you're going to die. And there are only so many times your family can go through that. So of course after nine months I emerged on the other side and everything was fine and most of me was still alive, which is a win by comparison to what a lot of other people had, but I still didn't get off lightly.

No.
I'd still like to be able to hold my girlfriend's hand and be able to feel that.

But you can't now?
I can't, no.

Having been through this, how do you feel when you see politicians talking about what they're going to do to the NHS?
It's completely disingenuous what most politicians say, they just toe the party line and most parties are funded by large private healthcare services, so the party line is going to be: "We need more donations so we're going to further privatisation." Most MPs I've spoken to don't really understand the issues. It's not surprising – they're not a doctor, they've never been a doctor, they haven't had the kind of illness that I've had. So when they talk about the NHS maybe they think it makes sense, but all the evidence is there and they're falling down in their duty by not looking at the evidence that says if you privatise it, it gets worse.

What do you think of the recent NHS workers' strikes?
Yes, yes, well the strikers have the support of the party in general and my support in particular. I think it's got to be very difficult because the one percent pay rise has been denied to 60 percent of NHS staff, including 70 percent of nurses, and even that would be a real terms pay cut. So it amounts to a pay cut for most of our nurses in the same year that MPs have allowed themselves a 10 percent pay rise.

Are there signs of that sort of activity growing?
I think so. We didn't used to have NHS strikes. The first doctors' strike was a couple of years ago – the first in three decades – and nurses' strikes are getting more common. These are people who believe in the NHS, as I do. They don't go out on strike lightly. Most of them are just as concerned about the fate of the NHS as they are about their fate individually. Did you know one in five NHS workers has a second job just to get by?

Really? I didn't know that.
Yeah, one in five.

Right. What about Labour? Are they going to save the NHS?
They've been making the noises, but if you look at their policies they're not actually going to change any of it. Their headlines sound good but if you look at the details of the policies they've published, those aren't good. They'll say, "anti-privatisation", they'll mean, "we're going to make it slightly harder for private companies to bid for NHS contracts, but it's still going to happen". And it's happening in my constituency in Nottingham as we speak, dermatology was lost in December, more departments are falling away all the time.

In fact, Labour started it in 2007. And if you look at Labour's 2 percent increase in the NHS budget over five years – when you factor in inflation that's a real terms cut as well.

So do you reckon all the main parties are going to screw the NHS?
We wouldn't have formed our party if we trusted the Labour Party to do their job to protect the NHS. So we're standing really more out of sadness than in anger.

Understood. Thanks, John.

@SimonChilds13

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