By Andriana Simos.
WITH a sparkle in his hazel eyes and laughter in his voice, Mark Adamson, 67, contemplates how an incurable disease nearly destroyed his inspirational dream to travel around Europe.
Faced with debilitating symptoms such as severe headaches and swollen ankles, Mark put aside his travelling dreams and began searching for a cure from ectopic Cushing’s disease.
“I was so angry because they couldn’t work out why I had it. It usually comes from something in the pituitary gland. If not, it could be from some form of cancer,” Mark says.
“That was the fear all along… They expected that I had some form of cancer.”
With this fear firmly anchored in Mark’s consciousness, it was only after four tumultuous weeks in hospital, hoping silently for a cure, that he was finally diagnosed.
“They found that my cortisol levels were very high, which is something to do with Cushing’s. It was horrible because I was very weak. I couldn’t get up and needed to be lifted onto the toilet and into the shower,” he recalls.
“So when the doctor came in and said, ‘I think we found the problem,’ I couldn’t believe it!”
The realisation that a small lump on Mark’s kidney could be causing the ectopic Cushing’s disease, allowed him to sigh in relief. In fact, once his kidney was removed during day surgery, Mark was determined to finally achieve his dream of travelling with his wife, Julie.
“Sometimes you think, ‘Gee, I may not be able to do anymore so I better do this one while I can,’” he says.
“I didn’t know what was going to happen in the future but that wasn’t going to stop me. Better to have this one trip rather than none.”
As Mark lounges in the sunroom of his Moorebank home, it is this fervour for travel which is strikingly inspirational. Even as he describes how his symptoms returned whilst he was overseas, it is clear that nothing could deter Mark from his travels.
“We did a little work at a B&B in Blackheath… We volunteered to look after the house and make the beds and breakfasts. I was developing Cushing’s again but I didn’t even care,” he says.
This carefree attitude also propelled Mark to embark on his long-awaited Norway cruise.
“Oh yes! It was such a nice, relaxing cruise. You could sit on the veranda and watch the world sail by and think how lucky you were!” he exclaims with his trademark grin.
“Lucky” is exactly what Mark considers himself to be.
After two months overseas, he returned just in time to discover that a new lump on his lung could have caused the reoccurrence of his ectopic disease.
“You could hear Julie ringing up Doctor Hamish Russell… and he was giving instructions on what to give me. I could only think to myself, ‘Oh, there is still something wrong with me,’” Mark says.
“But after a lot of consultation… they eventually took out a lobe from my lung. They examined it and found that it had caused the disease.”
Today, Mark considers this discovery a miracle. He finally received the thrilling news that he had been cured from a rare and apparently incurable disease.
“In fact, after the operation, I was at home with my sister when Doctor Russell rang. I put my phone on loudspeaker and he said, ‘This is it. We think we have done it!’ So that was pretty exciting,” he recalls.
It has been four months since then and Mark still cannot believe his luck.
“It seems as though things start happening to you when you get a bit older that you don’t expect,” he laughs.
That is certainly true. Ectopic Cushing’s disease is unusual for a man and it is difficult to locate the abnormal position of the source. For this reason, Mark is a miracle man. A miracle man who made it his mission to overcome hardships, achieve his dream of travelling and to find his very own pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
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