Mike Peters, longtime member and vocalist for Welsh rock band The Alarm, has been regularly updating fans with the news of his autobiography Love 1959-1991, available November 1. However, Peters surprised fans on Friday, October 25, with a post to The Alarm’s website detailing how he has been living with cancer for the past 29 years.
The post initially starts with Peters explaining how 29 years ago, on October 25 1995, he “first heard the words ‘Cancer and Mike Peters’ in the same sentence.” Peters goes on the explain how October 25, 2024 is the day that he would have started conditioning for a stem cell transplant with The Christie Hospital in Manchester, but on October 3 he “discovered that the Richter’s Syndrome had aggressively broken down my hard-earned remission and, therefore, denied me the opportunity to have this potentially lifesaving procedure.”
Peters quells fans’ fears by stating that The Christie Hospital “acted swiftly” and for the last two weeks Peters has been undergoing a “new six cycle bi-weekly chemotherapy regimen called R-Gemox” in the hopes of one day tackling the stem cell transplant.
“The future is uncertain,” Peters writes, “but I still have many optimistic options to focus on as I navigate life with the one person who has been beside me in all of this… my wife and life-long soul mate, Jules.”
Peters then recalls a day in 1984 in which The Alarm shared the stage with The Smiths at the BBC Studios in London, attaching the lyrics Morrissey sang that day: “All men have secrets and here is mine, so let it be known / For we have been through hell and high tide, I think I can rely on you / And yet you start to recoil / Heavy words are so lightly thrown / But still I’d leap in front of a flying bullet for you.”
Peters explains that he met his wife, Jules Peters, two years later in August 1986. He claims that ever since they met, “she has been the one to leap in front of flying bullets for me.” He also mentions that Jules is the “only person, in fact, who has been prepared to selflessly protect me against all odds on a consistent lifelong basis.”
According to Peters, Jules has “made light of the challenges” that the Peters family has had to face since Peters’ Richter’s Syndrome was made apparent in April of this year, “at the modern rifle speed of 3,900 feet per second.” Peters says that “Jules was the person who dived into action and took the full force of this most unexpected shock square between her shoulders.”
Peters explains that the experience of sitting in a room where a person describes your chances of survival “in the most bleak terms” can be “heartbreaking”; yet he states that “Jules was so strong under these circumstances that her strength allowed me to prepare myself to face down the darkest of possibilities and focus on the small percentages of light and slim chance of survival that I must attain in order to live.”
“Every day on Facebook, Instagram and other platforms, Jules tells of our rock and rollercoaster life with good grace and humor,” Peters writes, “making light of the fact that while her husband is literally fighting for his life, she also has two boys to guide through our lives.”
Peters says that his two sons, Dylan and Evan, have grown up with cancer “as an ever present,” but that Jules “has fostered the mindset in both of them that they need not fear for the future and that they should trust what they see and not what they read. That Mum and Dad have lived through the most challenging of circumstances and will continue to be there for them throughout all the normal passages of life and share in their hopes and dreams as much as any other normal cancer-free family might aspire to.”
Peters writes that he is “lucky to have Jules, we are lucky to have Jules.” He also states that he will endure “because of her strength, courage and will to push on through to the other side of whatever is next.” He thanks his wife “for being my love and my life” and that she is “one in a million” and makes sure to mention that Jules has been commissioned by A Way With Media to write her own autobiography.
Before bidding his fans farewell for now, Peters makes note of the charity Love, Hope, Strength that he and Jules co-founded with friends in 2007. The charity will be launching the One In A Million campaign in partnership with the nonprofit organization DKMS to register more people to the blood stem cell donor registry “in the hope of finding life saving matches for people like me, who are living with blood cancer and need a stem cell transplant from an unrelated matched donor to live and have a second chance at life.” He urges fans to get on the list today so they too can become “one in a million.”
Peters signs off with “love and life,” adding a postscript that says, “29 years ago today, I played at The New Cellar in South Shields and tonight I play at the De Valence Pavilion Theatre in Tenby; 29 years of rocking, rolling, living, loving and staying alive. Bring it on!”
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