For the last 31 days, Guy O’Leary has been swimming a mile a day in the cold waters of Dublin Bay to raise money for cancer research.

More than 100 people have joined him swimming either physically next to him or virtually in the sea or swimming pools in 15 cities around the world including New York, London, Vancouver, Barcelona and Dar es Salaam.

This afternoon he will swim his final mile alone, starting in Scotsman’s Bay near the Boyd Memorial on the East pier of Dun Laoghaire before swimming around into the harbour to finish at the Royal Irish Yacht Club. O’Leary will finish his month of swimming after raising more than €40,000 for cancer research in Ireland and Britain.

But just what prompted his journey?

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O’Leary’s liver cancer was stage four, and of a type that gave him a 10 per cent chance of survival.

Guy O’Leary was a successful investment banker in Cantor Fitzgerald in London in November 2017. He was less than a year married to Aoife O’Brien, a manager with Google, and everything was going well. “It was a great time,” O’Leary said. “I was fit and healthy. I’d almost never gone to the doctor and I felt great.”

O’Leary’s father had been treated for cancer a few years earlier, however, so O’Brien pushed him to go for a health check-up just as a precaution. “Everything changed after that,” O’Leary said. “I found out that I had stage one bowel cancer.”

O’Leary had surgery to cut his cancer out, and for a while, it looked like it was over. “About three months later by chance, I did a PET scan and they found that it had moved to my liver,” he said.

O’Leary’s liver cancer was stage four, and of a type that gave him a 10 per cent chance of survival.

“I had another huge surgery and after that, I went through 11 cycles of chemotherapy,” he said. It was only in October 2018 that O’Leary was given the all-clear after almost a year of treatments.

“I started to think how lucky I had been,” O’Leary said. “My Granny had the same cancer as me 35 years ago, but back then they could barely diagnose it, yet alone treat it.

“I was lucky that we had the tools to treat my cancer. Today we have much better surgeries and drugs but we need to invest in continuing to make them better.”

O’Leary said his surgeon had been able to use a da Vinci surgical system robot to carry out incredibly difficult work removing his cancer. “It is a revolutionary technology,” he said. “I was able to walk out of the hospital four days later…and this meant I could start chemotherapy just two weeks after what was a huge surgery.

“New drugs and steroids also really helped me. They meant I was able to take these highly toxic drugs without too many side effects, meaning I could be treated better.”

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For the last month, O’Leary has swum different routes off the coast of South County Dublin. He has seen porpoises, seals and jellyfish crisscrossing different routes from Seapoint to Killiney Beach. He has moved back to Dublin with his wife Aoife since Covid-19 arrived and is able to do the same work he used to do for Cantor Fitzerald in London here.

O’Leary said he was grateful to Ronan Reid and all in Cantor Fitzgerald for supporting his daily swimming challenge. A lot of the people who have swum beside him, he said, have lost loved ones to cancer.

“It can get quite emotional swimming for so long,” O’Leary said. “People are thinking about someone who has died or is going through cancer right now. I am definitely going to feel a bit emotional when I swim the last mile this May. But I will also feel unbelievably happy to be able to do so.”