Running For His Life

When commodities trader Craig Banks was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer, his fitness and competitive spirit helped him nail the ultimate race.

- Catriona Ross

CRAIG BANKS WAS 25 and sensed life was just getting started. He’d left Cape Town to join a few mates in the UK in 2002, where he’d bagged his dream job with an oil trading company.

But a few months in, everything started going wrong. First, the Dutch visa he needed to continue working with that company didn’t come through – then, before departing from Cape Town, his visa-requisite chest X-ray picked up a small node on his neck. His GP advised Craig to contact him if it hadn’t disappeared within a month. “I chose to ignore him,” says Craig, who is now 40. “I started feeling worse and worse, and the node in my neck was getting bigger. It would shrink down, then grow again – I thought it was stress-related.” He constantly felt itchy; then came unsettling night sweats: he’d wake up three times a night, drenched, and had to keep a pile of towels beside his bed. Eventually the node pressed on his vocal chords and he began to cough. “I was very fit before I went – I’d played lots of cricket and rugby, run countless half marathons, surf-skiied and surfed – so I didn’t really believe I was ill.”

But when the job fell through after 10 months, Craig flew home to Cape Town. His mother burst into tears at the sight of him.

Falling Apart

After a scan and biopsy at Constantiaberg Mediclinic, haematologist Professor Peter Jacobs diagnosed stage four lymphoma: cancer of the lymph nodes. Very advanced, it had spread to his neck, chest and abdomen. “Prof said, ‘Craig, you’re very sick. We can make you better but we’re going to make you a lot more sick in order to make you better. And you’ve got to go to the sperm bank because you’ll never have kids naturally,’” he recalls.