'If I have to die, so be it': Advocating for change, Délı̨nę elder with advanced cancer heads home
CBC
When Délı̨nę elder Morris Neyelle woke up from emergency surgery to remove a pop can-sized tumour from his colon, the world seemed painted in fluorescent green.
He was in the most pain he had ever felt. After a few minutes, colours returned to normal and he could see again. He asked the doctors at Stanton Territorial Hospital in Yellowknife: 'Why did you bring me back here for? Why didn't you just let me go?'
"I think they said, 'That's not our job. Our job is to make you survive,'" Neyelle, who is 71, recalled.
Neyelle — an artist, photographer and former band councillor — returned to Délı̨nę this past week, more than a month after paying his own way to Yellowknife to see a doctor about terrible stomach pain. He found out he has stage four cancer, a type of advanced cancer that requires surgery or radiation.
With his arm around his wife, Bernice, Neyelle told CBC News so far he's opted not to go down to Edmonton for radiation treatments.
"If I have to die, so be it, because I don't want to go through all this unless something comes up that tells me I should go, because I have my own beliefs with my elders and culture as well," he said.
He added he'd rather stay in the N.W.T., where he has supports.
"Through the month we've been [at Stanton], and even way back, I learned how to accept death, how to cope," he said.
"I don't want to be afraid. Why should you be afraid? It's always around us. We need to learn that ahead of time, because if you don't, you suffer great. I learned that from my parents."
Neyelle has used his situation to draw awareness to the lack of health services in smaller N.W.T. communities. Bloodwork and stool tests done at the health centre in Délı̨nę had come back without detecting his cancer, and there were no specialists there to diagnose his pain.
The pain in his stomach had been getting worse, and grew unbearable after he spent a week scraping hides to make traditional drums.
He said at that point, his doctor told him the only way he could get a full check-up was to go to Inuvik or Yellowknife.
"I know I always complained about my stomach, but it's never been really looked at until the very last second. And now I'm on stage four," he said.
"I figured I need to do something, and this is one of the things — I want to make people realize what's wrong, what's happened with the government. They need to push for more facilities for early detection of cancer."
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