At 83 years old, Denis still climbs ladders to prune his pear tree. He weeds his garden on his hands and knees. He mows his own lawn in the New York neighborhood where he and his wife, Sheila, raised their two children.
He also has pleural mesothelioma, an aggressive cancer of the lung lining caused by asbestos exposure.
“I tell him, ‘I think you’re faking this. You don’t really have cancer,’” jokes his daughter, Deirdre, describing the week she caught him gardening 3 days in a row.
Denis is an Irish immigrant who spent more than three decades working in New York City power plants. He never knew the asbestos around him would follow him into retirement.
He’s still here nearly 2 years after his diagnosis thanks to advances in mesothelioma treatment, a devoted family, and his own stubborn determination.
Work That Came With Hidden Risks
Denis was born in Ireland in 1943 and grew up working on his family’s farm alongside his father. At age 21, he boarded a ship for New York City in search of opportunity. He found it at one of the city’s largest utility companies, where he was hired as a janitor.
Within a few years, he worked his way up to Mechanic-A, a skilled position he would hold until his retirement. Over the course of 37 years, Denis worked in over a dozen different power plants across the five boroughs and in upstate New York.
What he didn’t know — and what no one told him — was that nearly every one of those job sites was filled with asbestos.
“There were 14 or 15 job sites I’d previously worked on going back to the 1960s, and they all had asbestos,” Denis recalls. “Boilers, pumps, turbines, numerous other items. Nearly everything had asbestos materials. We didn’t know it was dangerous.”
Sheila remembers the clothes he brought home from the plants — “just filthy,” soaked with sweat and coated in dust. It wasn’t until the 1970s that workers were finally warned that asbestos exposure could cause cancer. By then, Denis had already spent years working around it unprotected.
Learn how other patients affected by asbestos exposure navigated diagnosis, treatment, and life afterward in our Free Mesothelioma Survivors Guide.
The Day Retirement Took an Unexpected Turn
Denis stayed healthy long after retirement, golfing multiple times a week, gardening, walking, and traveling back to Ireland with Sheila every year. He was diligent about his health, too, getting screened for cancer regularly because of his known asbestos exposure. Then, in the summer of 2024, everything changed.
“I was working in my backyard, and I noticed that my legs got quite weak as I proceeded to plant seeds,” Denis remembers. He told Deirdre, who called his doctor.
The answer was immediate: Go to the hospital. X-rays revealed something in his lung. A PET scan confirmed the family’s worst fear: pleural mesothelioma.
Deirdre, a pharmacist, understood right away what “a thickness in the lining of his lungs” meant. Her father had worked in a group of 325 men. Over the years, she’d watched most of them pass away, many from work-related illnesses.
“I remember the day that the nurse practitioner called to say the type of mesothelioma he had,” she says. “I had to sit down. I was like, ‘Really?’ Because we knew that meant like 6 months.”
Facing Mesothelioma Together as a Family
If there’s a heart to Denis’s story, it’s this: He’s never faced this disease alone. Sheila is by his side through every chemotherapy infusion and every scan, riding what she calls “a bit of a roller coaster” of good days and hard days.
“You just have to keep going and do the best you can,” she says. “One day at a time — and be thankful for every day.”
Deirdre, who lives just 5 blocks away, now coordinates her father’s care. “I’m a pharmacist, so I have a little bit of a health care background,” she says. “I’m involved with all the doctor appointments, all the treatments. I try to go to all his scans. I went to his radiation.”
But the family’s most important strategy has nothing to do with medicine. Instead of waiting and worrying, they’ve chosen to live. “We’re all trying to get in a lot of quality time to make a lot of great memories,” Deirdre says, “because we know our time is limited.”
That means family cruises to Alaska and Hawaii, as well as trips to the house Denis built in 2005 on his family’s property in Ireland, now scheduled carefully between chemotherapy sessions.
The Treatments Helping Denis Live Longer
Every 3 weeks, Denis travels to Memorial Sloan Kettering — one of the nation’s top mesothelioma cancer centers — for chemotherapy. Every 3 months, he undergoes scans to track the disease.
His treatment journey hasn’t been easy. He’s undergone radiation multiple times and tried immunotherapy before moving to his current chemotherapy regimen.
“For the rest of his life, he’s going to have to keep doing some sort of treatment in order to stay alive,” Deirdre explains. “It’s a job. He’s a trooper. He’s doing it.”
His secret to survival isn’t complicated. When Deirdre once thanked him for enduring so much treatment for his family’s sake, he set her straight in classic Denis fashion:
“I’m not doing this to be with you guys. I’m doing this because I don’t want to die.”
Denis credits regular screenings for catching the cancer before it spread, and he has a message for every worker who ever handled asbestos.
“I would tell anybody who has worked in asbestos or around asbestos, they should have an X-ray every year, once a year,” he says. “It may save your life.”
Holding Asbestos Companies Accountable
The companies that made and sold asbestos products knew about the dangers for decades and kept selling them anyway.
“Those manufacturers were told that asbestos was bad and could cause cancer, and they continued to manufacture their products for a profit,” Denis says. “They didn’t worry about any worker working in factories or anywhere else, as long as they had their profit.”
After his diagnosis, Denis’s family connected with national mesothelioma law firm Simmons Hanly Conroy. Aside from one visit to the family’s home, everything was handled by Zoom, and Denis never had to set foot in a courtroom.
“They held our hand the whole process,” Deirdre says. “There was no stress. My father didn’t have to leave the house. It was just a very simple process considering what a big case it was.”
Because mesothelioma cases are fast-tracked, the timeline moved quickly: Denis signed with the firm in August 2024, gave his deposition in September, and received his first check from an asbestos trust fund in February. Settlements from multiple asbestos companies followed.
The money from the mesothelioma settlements covers his ongoing medical expenses — the scans, the infusions, the consultations that Sheila says “cost a fortune every month.”
“It was excellent working with Simmons Hanly Conroy,” Denis says simply. “Any question I would ask, I would get a hundred percent correct answer.”
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An Irish Grandfather’s Legacy
Ask about Denis’s grandchildren, and the whole family lights up. He has 6 of them: Deirdre’s 3 sons, now in their early twenties, and his son’s 3 younger children, including a granddaughter named Grace whom Deirdre describes as her father’s perfect match.
The grandkids don’t call him Grandpa. Deirdre’s oldest son, seeing the newspapers and mail always scattered around the house, dubbed him “Papers” as a toddler, and it stuck. When Deirdre’s boys were young, Denis and Sheila babysat while she worked.
“Any bit of handiness my children have comes from being here in my parents’ house,” Deirdre says. “In their backyard, in their basement, helping change the oil, mow the lawn, fix the boiler, paint. Anything that my kids are able to do as handymen comes 100% from my dad.”
That’s another part of what makes the diagnosis so painful — the milestones Denis may miss.
“It’s not fair that my father is not going to be here when my kids get married,” Deirdre says. “When Joseph finishes medical school, how proud would this Irish immigrant be to see his grandson become a doctor?”
But the family takes comfort in knowing his legacy is secure in the memories they’re making now, and in the compensation that will help pay for his younger grandchildren’s college educations and maybe even his grandkids’ first homes.
“His legacy will definitely live on,” Deirdre says, “because he is unforgettable.”
Let Mesothelioma Hope Help You Fight
Denis has simple advice for anyone facing an asbestos-related diagnosis: Don’t wait, and don’t go it alone.
To those who think pursuing legal help isn’t worth the trouble, he doesn’t mince words: “I would say that they’re very foolish. The companies that manufactured those products made a profit and didn’t care about them.”
“They deserve to get compensation no matter how old they are,” Deidre adds. “Let the companies pay for everything.”
If you or a loved one has been diagnosed with mesothelioma, you don’t have to face it alone either. Mesothelioma Hope can help your family focus on treatment and making memories together.
Call (866) 608-8933 or contact our team of Patient Advocates and nurses now. We can also connect you with Simmons Hanly Conroy if you’re eligible for compensation.
