Ryan Lougheed working to bring blue light cystoscopy to Sudbury

Ryan Lougheed of Sudbury went to the bathroom a couple years ago, and it changed his life.

There was blood in the bowl.

"I was up at my cottage and I was working on a shed and had to go to the washroom," Lougheed said. "There was a little bit of complications with it, which was abnormal so later on that evening I went to the washroom and I saw blood in my urine and immediately called the doctor."

Doctors soon after diagnosed Ryanwith bladder cancer, and he's been fighting it ever since.

"It was surreal," he said. "I didn't really know what was happening. And I decided that I could take this battle on my own hands and go forward from there."

"But all kinds of weird thoughts, like I'm going to die, what is my wife going to do? It's a tornado of thoughts inside your head."

After an initial round of treatment, Lougheed also heard about a specialized tool to detect bladder cancer.

"I had a friend that had sent me an article from Maclean's magazine that had this special instrumentspecific to bladder cancer detection, as well as removal," he said.

The tool is called blue lightcystoscopy.

"I asked my doctor right away about it and he explained a little bit more about it with me and I decided at that point in time we need one of these in Sudbury."

The challenge for Lougheed, and for others with bladder cancer, is that Sudbury does not have such a tool.

"They're fairly rare across Canada," Lougheed said. "It's something that's been approved by Health Canada for quite some time now probably three to five years. But there's probably only eight to 10 instruments across the country."

Lougheed decided he would help lead the charge to get one in the city, and to raise awareness of the disease.

The campaign currently sits around $100,000, as it rolls into a fundraising weekend. Lougheed has teamed up with Ionic Engineering and the Northern Cancer Foundation for the Sudbury Fitness Challenge as they push to raise enough money for the new bladder cancer technology.

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