Boy, 6, helps Dad fight cancer

A BOY from Caversham has written a book with his father who has undergone treatment for cancer.

Carsten Pleiser, 40, was diagnosed with stage four oesophageal cancer in October last year and has been through eight rounds of chemotherapy.

He had been receiving treatment from the Royal Marsden Hospital and while he was told last month that he was in remission, he is continuing immunotherapy treatment to try and prevent it from returning.

Mr Pleiser and his wife Alison, who live in Richmond Road, decided not to tell Sidney, six, the extent of his treatment and why because they wanted to try and create positive memories instead.

He said: “One evening a couple of months ago, Sidney and I were sitting here on the couch, and he asked me if I could tell him a story. Usually, he wants me to make stories up from scratch, but I asked him if he wanted to make one up himself instead.

“Sidney then set out what was to be the story in the book. He began talking about this little alien and I kept asking him what happened next and whether there was anything else and he kept going. He went on and on and in the end he came up with what was a really cool story.

“That same evening we decided to put it into a book. I just found the idea quite pure — having a child’s imagination and putting that into a book completely unedited, without any input from me.

“So, the next morning, I basically looked out for how to do that. I had no idea how to do it as I had never published a book before. So, I looked up a course and then went on to find an illustrator.”

They hired Mariana Diuh, who is based in Kyiv, Ukraine, and they worked on the story together.

Mr Pleiser said: “We had so much fun developing it. We were laughing about it and thought about putting it in a book because then all his friends can read it.

“Alison and I didn’t do it because we want to make ourselves famous or rich. What we really wanted to do was give back to the Royal Marsden Hospital because they’ve been my hospital for the last seven months and so that’s where the proceeds are going.”

The end result was A Sweet Journey Through Space: The Exciting Adventures of Chocolate, The Little Alien. The book follows Chocolate, who loves strawberry cake. But when his favourite bakery on Planet Bong runs out, he journeys to Earth in search of more.

Chocolate learns to appreciate its uniqueness and discovers kindness in unexpected places, to teach the reader about gratitude, friendship, and the joy of exploration.

Mr Pleiser said: “Sidney’s personality is running through it and includes some of the wacky things he says and also stuff he is learning about at The Heights, where he gos to school, so there are other animals in it, such as an African elephant.

“We would then pass illustration drafts to Sidney and talk through the designs and he would say whether he would like this or that elephant and other stuff like that. He wanted them to have little chocolate belly buttons and wanted particular colours.

“The Aliens also had to have antennae and the illustrator would then send back different pictures of what Chocolate was going to look like. One of them was square, which he didn’t like at all. It looked like a chocolate bar which to him was not an Alien. He knew what he wanted.”

Mr Pleiser, who runs an online design company, considers himself to be very fit and so his cancer diagnosis came as a shock.

He said: “Last year I’ve been climbing mountains, such as Mount Kilimanjaro and Mont Blanc. I found that I had lost a bit of weight but I felt healthy and I was going to the gym five times a week.

“I never smoked in my life, never drank very much and led a healthy lifestyle. But then all of a sudden, I had this acid reflux symptom. I went to the see the GP and to start with it was thought that I was healthy. I kept on pushing for an answer and, after some tests, it turned out to be stage four cancer.

“I was then bombarded with drugs for the last eight months because they thought I could cope with it but after doing the chemotherapy I found that I couldn’t even walk more than 10,000 steps a day.”

Mr Pleiser has been talking about his experiences on a YouTube channel to capture and share family life and the ups and downs of treatments.

He said: “You feel a little bit scared about the next steps because you feel really safe when you are in this cycle of chemotherapy and you get three or four appointments coming up.

“But, once it’s over, you want to know what’s next, if anything is next. With a late-stage advanced cancer diagnosis, you don’t know what you’re going to get in the end.

“Apparently, I’ve responded to the treatment over the last eight cycles very, very well. My body coped very well with everything. Then we got the confirmation that there’s no evidence of active disease at the moment. That kind of sounds good on paper but then you realise that everything in life is temporary.

“So, I take it really with a neutral approach. I’m not too excited about it. I’m not too worried about it. I just take it as it is because that’s the only way you can live with it. You have to accept that today is the day and tomorrow is tomorrow and we’re living in the moment now. We’re hoping that the current regime with the two of the immunotherapy drugs I’m on, will hopefully last quite a while and keep me at this stage for a while.

“But you never know with cancer, you never know what you’re going to get and you will have blips and there will be ups and downs.”

Mr Pleiser says the diagnosis has meant he has changed his worldview and is focusing on his family to help him cope.

He said: “Immediately I was really realising what life is all about and it came down to family and experiences and people, community, neighbours and friends. Love is all there is. So it almost like it gave me a new lease of life. I always see it as like cancer didn’t happen to me, it happened for me.”

Mrs Pleiser, 46, is vice-president international at the Hollywood Reporter and said that the journey has been “tough” on the family but the book has allowed them to support the hospital, with all proceeds being donated to it.

She said: “Sidney doesn’t know the extent of Carson's illness and he doesn’t need to know. We just say daddy’s having treatment to heal from inside.

“We wanted to give something back but also get Sidney involved in that process. So, the book seemed like a really good marrying of the two. The fact that he can see the good that you can bring from producing something like this is great.

“It has been quite a journey but it makes you have a lot of gratitude for what you have. It’s a legacy as well, because it’s something Carsten and Sidney did together.”

• A Sweet Journey Through Space: The Exciting Adventures of Chocolate, The Little Alien costs £7.99 from Amazon.