The Alarm’s Mike Peters Issues Personal Message Regarding His Cancer Battle
Bobby Caughron 
The Alarm’s Mike Peters has issued the following update :
Hello Everybody,
29 years ago today on October 25th 1995, I first heard the words “Cancer and Mike Peters” in the same sentence.
October 25th 2024 is also the day I would have started conditioning for Stem Cell Transplant at The Christie Hospital in Manchester but unfortunately on October 3rd, I discovered that the Richter’s Syndrome had aggressively broken down my hard-earned remission and, therefore, denied me the opportunity to have this potentially lifesaving procedure. So close, yet so far.
Despite this setback, The Christie Hospital team acted swiftly, and so for the last two weeks, I have been having a new six cycle bi-weekly chemotherapy regimen called R-Gemox, as a bridge to a revolutionary new therapy called CAR-T or, (if I can regain a new complete remission status), then Stem Cell Transplant.
The future is uncertain, but I still have many optimistic options to focus on as I navigate life with the one person who has been beside me in all of this… my wife and life-long soul mate, Jules.
It’s also forty years since I shared a stage with Morrissey and The Smiths at the BBC studios in London recording Top of The Pops and I have never forgotten the lyrics of the song Morrissey sang that day in 1984.
All men have secrets and here is mine, so let it be known
For we have been through hell and high tide, I think I can rely on you
And yet you start to recoil
Heavy words are so lightly thrown
But still I’d leap in front of a flying bullet for you
Two years later in August 1986, I met Jules and ever since, she has been the one to leap in front of flying bullets for me. The only person, in fact, who has been prepared to selflessly protect me against all odds on a consistent lifelong basis.
Jules is a master of social media communication and has made light of the challenges we have had to face as a family since April this year when the demonic Richter’s Syndrome was fired into the midst of our lives, at the modern rifle speed of 3,900 feet per second. Jules was the person who dived into action and took the full force of this most unexpected shock, square between her shoulders.
To be sitting in a room with a doctor you have only known for one minute and then to hear that person describe your chances of survival in the most bleak terms can be heartbreaking in the extreme. Jules was so strong under these circumstances that her strength allowed me to prepare myself to face down the darkest of possibilities and focus on the small percentages of light and slim chance of survival that I must attain in order to live.
It was Jules who then built and created the protective bubble that allowed me to endure the chemotherapy and carry on playing shows while having the proverbial “kitchen sink” thrown at me.
Every day on Facebook, instagram, and other platforms, Jules tells of our rock and rollercoaster life with good grace and humour, making light of the fact that while her husband is literally fighting for his life, she also has two boys to guide through their lives.
Our boys Dylan (20), and Evan (17), have grown up with cancer as an ever present, but it is Jules who has fostered the mindset in both of them, that they need not fear for the future and that they should trust what they see and not what they read. That Mum and Dad have lived through the most challenging of circumstances and will continue to be there for them throughout all the normal passages of life and share in their hopes and dreams as much as any other normal cancer-free family might aspire to.
Opposite the ever flowing waterfalls in our village of Dyserth, Jules has built the most amazing community hub down at The Red. Conversation between locals and long distant visitors now flows as effortlessly as the waters of the Glan Ffyddion that streams by on the other side of the road.
It is the constant energy of generations being passed from family to family, person to person, story to story that is making a difference in all our lives.
I am lucky to have Jules, we are lucky to have Jules.
I will endure because of her strength, courage and will to push on through to the other side of whatever is next.
The future may be uncertain but what is certain is that today has arrived and as Jules likes to remind us with her love of life, her imagination and eye for a photograph and beautifully observed observation, that anything is possible.
Thanks, Jules, for being my love and my life. You are one in a million. In sickness and in health, I am proud to have been your ever loving husband since 1988, and even prouder now that you have been commissioned by A Way With Media to write your own autobiography. I can’t wait to read it, and can only pray that there is no mention of my prowess on putting the bins out!!!
My new chemotherapy regimen now affords more time to find the best match for a future stem cell transplant. I’m lucky to have Jules, access to incredible clinical teams thanks to our NHS here in the U.K., I’m lucky to have the support of so many people who have been wishing me well.
I know not everyone is so lucky. That’s why our charity, Love Hope Strength that Jules and I co-founded with friends back in 2007, will be launching the One In A Million campaign in partnership with DKMS this month with the sole aim of registering more people to the blood stem cell donor registry in the hope of finding life savings matches for people like me, who are living with blood cancer and need a stem cell transplant from an unrelated matched donor to live and have a second chance at life.
Please get on the list today and become one in a million.
Love and life,
Mike Peters
October 25th 2024
PS: 29 years ago today, I played at The New Cellar in South Shields and tonight I play at the De Valence Pavilion Theatre in Tenby, 29 years of rocking, rolling, living, loving and staying alive. Bring it on!
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