Tobacco Nation Episode 1 - Cancer

First Nations Health Authority audio

FNHA CEO Joe Gallagher is from Tla'amin First Nation. He talks about his own close call with cancer, which came on the heels of his father’s death due to cancer. Joe shares his story in the hopes of creating a space where we can all begin talking about cancer sooner – before it’s too late. “Testing is extremely important. We need to go for regular screenings to detect problems early on,” says Joe. “I was fortunate to catch colon cancer at an early stage so a medical intervention actually addressed the situation ... Basically, that procedure saved my life.” Randall Stevens is an Algonquin man living in the Vancouver area. He had a family member who smoked and paid the ultimate price for it. Randall’s father was an army veteran, a smoker and, eventually, a victim of lung cancer. Randall followed fairly closely in his father’s footsteps: he was a fighter pilot in the service and a smoker. But when he witnessed his father being taken by lung cancer he was deeply affected. “As I watched him, I thought oh man, I don’t want to go like this. It took me several months to stop. It wasn’t until my father started to fade away … that it really did hit home. I needed to quit and I need to quit now,” says Randall.