Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for listening to me. I'm not sure what I can bring to this except maybe put a human face to the statistics you've heard. If I hear one more time about the survivability rate, I think it will be a single malt scotch evening for me, because my chances are not very good, are they? But they are still there—those chances.

I'm Colonel Jacques Ricard. I'm a medical officer, as we call it in the forces. I'm a physician, a general practitioner, and I have 33 years of service.

About a year and a half ago, as I was doing my physical fitness test, I felt a lot of pain in my back. The next day I couldn't get up. I thought it could have been a herniated disk or something. We started the process to get it tested, with the usual MRI to see if it was herniated disk. I got the MRI in July. The doctor came to see me, and he said it was not a herniated a disk, but cancer. He went to the next step, to try to find out where it came from. The CT scan showed it was from the lung. It was quite a surprise for me, because I am one of those non-smokers.

Initially you have to deal with the emergency stuff, radiotherapy for the spine and everything. I met Dr. Wheatley-Price for the medical oncology to see if there was a treatment for it.

When you're told that there is no cure, you start asking yourself, well, why isn't there a cure? When you're at stage IV, and you actually present so late that no surgery can be contemplated, you need to go through palliative care, if you like.

I did the radiotherapy. I was asking myself, what did I miss that would have made a difference in catching this at the early stage? I didn't miss anything. You know, you have a cough or something in the morning, and you think it's probably from the medication you're taking for hypertension, because one of the side effects is coughing. You have a little bit of rib pain, and you think it's costochondritis. You have a reason, an explanation, for just about every little symptom you have. When you do show up for that back pain, it's too late.

It's funny, because we have to go through all our annual physical medical examinations. I had a colonoscopy at the age of 50. I had a colonoscopy at the age of 55. I had the PSA for prostate, the blood test. My wife had a mammogram. My daughter had a pap smear. But nothing gets done for the lung part of it. There is so much reliance on the patient to themself to identify in their own body that there's something wrong and to show up and be tested for it, and then it's too late if you're trying to catch it in the patient.

I do believe there needs to be a way to identify people before they have symptoms, because when they have symptoms it's much too late. We have all those screening processes like that... I didn't have any symptoms at all to warrant the colonoscopy. I didn't have any symptoms at all to warrant the prostate. They were offered to me.

This brings me to the treatment. I'm one of the lucky ones, because I did have a biopsy. Being a non-smoker, I was told that there was a higher chance that I would have one of those mutations they were looking for, the ALK or the EGFR. You have to wait about a month before you get the results.

When the results came in, I was told I had a 50% chance of being positive. I was positive for EGFR, so I was one of those lucky ones—lucky unlucky ones—who could actually get the targeted therapy with medication that you take once a day and that gives you a very good quality of life. It's not chemotherapy and it's not radiotherapy. But this only puts a handbrake on the disease. For the last 10 months, I've been taking this medication and I haven't changed. My disease is stable, and I'm working part time, and everything looks the same. But the disease is still there. The CT scan shows the same things in my lungs and in my spine and in my pelvic area.

Now we have to rely on somebody to find a cure for something that I was told, a year ago, there is no cure for. But maybe in two years, or three years, maybe I will be told that we have a cure now for exactly what I have. The funding for the screening program would help somebody like my kids, and the funding for the research program would help somebody like me.

I'm really hoping that we can make a lot of progress if we invest a lot of money in this very lethal disease, with its very specific characteristic, if you like, of very often being identified too late to have a surgical cure.

Thank you.

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