My dad & I are raising money as a thank you to his amazing surgeon, who removed part of his lung in 2020 and saved his life. 

Dr Karen Phipps is a Consultant Thoracic Surgeon at Guys & St Thomas Hospital, operating on patients with the potentially deadly conditions of lung cancer and mesothelioma. Surgery offers patients the best chance of cure and minimally invasive surgery helps patients recover as quickly as possible. They now offer Robotic Surgery which is a further important advance in cancer treatment, and needs further investment.  

In addition, some patients have cancers that are too advanced for surgical removal. There are exciting new treatments, immunotherapy that may help these patients live longer but they need to understand more, about how individual tumours behave to give every patient the tailored and life saving treatment they need. 

At Guys, they see a huge number of patients, one of the biggest centres worldwide, and they so are in a great position to study tumours in depth. This research requires financial support for laboratory equipment and tests, in addition to staffing costs for data collection and analysis. 

Although surgery is often curative there are risks and complications and they continually strive to improve the outcomes and quality of life for all their patients and their families. Donations will also go to help this more practical clinical area of research into the smoothing the patient operative pathway before, during and after surgery. An example of this is, 3 years ago Dr Karen Phipps ran the Glencoe marathon and they used £9,000 of the donations to fund high flow oxygen machines meaning patients at high risk of respiratory complications could be treated on the ward rather than intensive care. 

Litter picking 81 streets for Lung Cancer & Mesothelioma Fund number 876