LAST year, Dan Yeates spent ten minutes in goal for his South London five-a-side football team. For a man who a few years ago played top tier American football and considered becoming a professional cyclist, it wasn’t a great sporting achievement. But Dan was elated.
“I’d gone to watch the boys but someone pulled a hamstring and I was drafted in,” Dan says. “It was amazing.” Those ten minutes were a miracle – because in January 2020, Dan was diagnosed with blood cancer.
Just 27 then and super-fit, Dan put feeling tired down to his 70-hour-a-week job in software sales and long-haul flights to visit his girlfriend Ruchel in Sydney. But a cough prompted him to visit a GP for the first time in seven years. He was prescribed antibiotics for a chest infection and given blood tests.
A month later – when he should have been in San Francisco at a conference – Dan was at St George’s Hospital in London having a bone marrow biopsy. It showed that he had acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, a rare form of blood cancer. “I had a 50-50 chance of making it to Christmas,” he says.
“I cried for 20 minutes – then went into problem-solving mode. “There was a 50 per cent chance of surviving this – awesome. I’d do everything the doctors told me and bring a positive attitude every day.
” While Dan started six months of chemo and radiotherapy, Ruchel moved to London and his five-a-side mates visited him in hospital. Then Covid hit – and Dan was confined to an isolation.
