They were both diagnosed with a rare and deadly brain cancer within two weeks of each other.
Coincidences are almost always described as strange, weird or odd. Here’s one: Gerry Matthews and his ex-wife Christine Seguin were both diagnosed with glioblastoma, a rare and deadly brain cancer, within two weeks of each other late last summer.Matthews is an accountant and has worked for the federal government for almost 40 years. He started to show signs of short-term memory loss last January and thought he was experiencing burnout.
Seguin has 64 staples in her head. Matthews has 76. Dill, 37, and her brother Richard Matthews, 35, have spent most of the past four months shuttling from one hospital to another. On Nov. 14, Seguin started to have difficulty processing instructions. She returned to hospital. It’s unlikely she will ever return home, said Dill.
Burnt Lands Road did not have city water, so any well that fed off the same underground seem might have carried chemicals, he reasoned. Maybe it was something in the water. The family moved to their new home on Nov. 11, 1990, and lived there for four years. Dill was eight and her brother was seven when they moved in and as children, they felt a little of the magic of the alvar. They hunted for frogs in the ponds that dotted the landscape. They walked through the cedar forest and learned to skate on one of the ponds.The Matthews’s house faced a portion of the alvar that had a connection to the Diefenbunker, located about 14 km away in Carp.
The Nature Conservancy of Canada turned the land over to the province for light recreational uses such as hiking and bird watching. The communications towers were removed sometime prior to the park being regulated as a provincial park in 2003, said Dean Noonan, park superintendent at Fitzroy Provincial Park.
He knocked on the door of the house where his family lived all those years ago, where Greg Smith and Danielle Viau now make their home.Viau and Smith had their own story. Viau had started to feel ill in September 2018. She felt nauseated and lost more than 30 pounds. Last March, she was diagnosed with a brain tumour the size of a pea. She has not had surgery, but the tumour, which has not grown, is being monitored.
Smith has questions of his own. Sitting in the kitchen of the house, he gestures out the window, which has a view of the alvar. He has heard that the property was chemically defoliated while the military was using it. He points out that the DND portion of the alvar has few tress on it — and these are relatively young — compared to the alvar lands on the other side of March Road.
“DND and the CAF are committed to conducting these activities in an environmentally-conscious way, and any pesticides are applied by licensed contractors in accordance with provincial and federal environmental regulations,” he said in a statement. Out of the 37.6 million people who live in Canada, it is estimated there will be 1,785 new glioblastoma cases a year.
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