“Giving up shouldn’t be in your vocabulary.”

Tony Redler clearly remembers the day he was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin lymphoma. “It was Friday the thirteenth, August 1982. The doctor came in and before he could get his words out, I told him I had cancer. I just knew,” recalls Tony. At the time, Tony was only 27 years old with a wife and two young children. “The doctor told us that there was a 90% cure rate and it was the most common cancer for men in my age group to get… I told him, ‘Let’s go get at it.’ ”

During his first fight against cancer, Tony had chemotherapy and endured 80 days of radiation treatments. His cancer went into remission and he was well enough to father another son in 1985. But then in 1990, his cancer came back. Chemotherapy followed. The cancer came back a third time in 1992. Tony became the first Canadian to undergo a bone marrow transplant for his type of cancer.

Tony had always told his family that he wanted to make it until he was 40. “When it came back the fourth time, it was two days before my fortieth birthday,” says Tony. “Our daughter cried when we told the children,” recalls his wife Carla. “She said, ‘Mom, why didn’t dad say he wanted to live until he was 60?’”

Tony was told that in Saskatchewan, only 5 people had had a second transplant but none survived. So the doctors sent Tony home to think about it. “We thought well someone had to be the first to survive and hopefully that would be Tony,” says Carla. Then the doctors suggested a new treatment a stem cell transplant.

The stem cell transplant and chemotherapy seem to have worked. Tony has been cancer-free since 1995. Tony says the rapid evolution of cancer research has given him a lot of hope. Tony volunteers for CancerConnection, the telephone-based Canadian Cancer Society support program that matches people living with cancer with volunteers who have been through a similar cancer experience. “I tell them, ‘Never give up on the fact that when one thing doesn’t work, there might be three other things that might. Giving up shouldn’t be in your vocabulary.’”

In 2005, Tony celebrated his fiftieth birthday with a big party attended by family and friends. He is looking forward to the birth of his second grandchild in 2007.

Read about Carla Redler's experience as a caregiver