26/05/2026
When Brian Melaugh began experiencing leg pain in 2015, he put it down to the amount of cycling he had been doing while training for the ‘Wicklow 200’ cycle. But he also visited his physiotherapist who suggested going for an MRI to find out what the problem was.
This scan was on the morning of Friday, March 27, and he didn’t expect to get any results back until Monday. However, at 2pm he got a call from his physio who recommended that he visit his doctor, as there was some concern with the scan.
“My best friend is a GP so I rang him and he told me to get to his surgery as soon as possible,” Brian says. “By the time I got there, he had the scan and it was clear there was something wrong with my back. At this stage I was beginning to think it could be cancer, but I was also comforting myself by thinking there might be a problem with the discs in my spine.
“I was advised to go to A&E straight away – and there I knew that things were serious because I was only at the hospital for about 10 minutes when I was called into a room on my own. I was told that they needed to do some tests and I asked if they could wait until my husband arrived as I didn’t want to be on my own. This was about 4pm and at this stage, I was in severe pain so I was given morphine.
“Waiting for the results was a strange experience, and at 11pm my fears were confirmed when a doctor came in and sat down beside us to confirm that I had cancer. He said that the level of calcium in my blood was extremely high and this was because something was breaking down my bones and the calcium was going into my blood. I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer that had started in the bone marrow.”
The Tyrone man, who lives in Dublin with his husband David and their dog Rian, was understandably shocked by the news, especially when the doctor told him the condition, which is “not the norm for someone of 48’”, wasn’t curable.
"My initial reaction was shock,” he says. “Nothing can prepare you for that."
