A CANCER patient who experienced a miraculous recovery successfully completed an eight-mile walk to raise money for Dorset County Hospital.

Weymouth pensioner Mike Furness, 69, thought his ‘days were numbered’ when he was told that he was too ill to receive treatment for the cancers that had invaded his lungs, liver and the arteries leading into his heart.

As the cancerous growths doubled in size he became extremely ill and was having coughing fits all day, every day.

He said: “No one really knows why but all my cancers are now in remission. I feel like I did 10 years ago. Sometimes I still get a bit puffed out but my improvement is getting better and better every day.”

To celebrate his new found health Mr Furness walked from Weymouth Marina to a hospital appointment at Dorset County Hospital in Dorchester to mark his achievement and raised £220 for the Fortuneswell ward cancer unit. He added: “It went really well. Because I have got such low red blood cell levels I did get a bit out of breath going up the hills but I finished, which is the main thing. As I was walking along the road a lot of people who had heard about my story were stopping their cars to put money in the pot, which helped push me on to the end.”

He said that it was the shock of his life to be diagnosed with kidney and bowel cancer two years ago, when previously he had led a healthy, active life.

After an operation on his kidney, secondary cancers developed and Mr Furness had a course of chemotherapy and stem cell harvesting but was unable to go through with further treatment due to a sudden deterioration of his health earlier this year.

Although unable to credit his recovery to anything Mr Furness said he had received electrotherapy treatment on the Isle of Wight and there has been a massive improvement since then. He also started consuming bicarbonate of soda, eating flak seed and lots of cottage cheese along with tablets that slow a cancer’s progress.

Nurse Julia Frater from Cancer Research UK said that patients can sometimes feel remarkably better for unexplained reasons.

She said: “Sometimes people go into remission or show symptoms of spontaneous remission and sometimes people can feel phenomenally good. It is hard to say from case to case but it can happen.”