‘It’s hard to explain cancer to a child’: Hong Kong father whose tumours have spread on his ‘last-ditch’ treatment and staying strong for his family

In 2019 Massimo Gavina learned he had stage 4 cancer. ‘I don’t want to die before I see my child getting a bit older. I still want to do things,’ he says

Minimally invasive surgery, crowdfunded after the restaurant exec exhausted his savings on treatment in Hong Kong as the tumours spread, offers a last hope

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Massimo Gavina, pictured at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong, was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer in 2019. The cancer spread, and his last hope is robotically assisted surgery in Italy, for which he is crowdfunding to cover the costs. Photo: K. Y. Cheng

Published: 6:15pm, 5 Mar 2023Updated: 1:33pm, 6 Mar 2023

In November 2019, Massimo Gavina woke up in the Discovery Bay, Hong Kong, home he shares with his wife and son and turned on the TV to catch the news. Oddly, he was seeing double in his right eye.

The food and drink professional and restaurant consultant wasn’t too concerned, but saw his doctor when his vision was still blurred the next day. He might have had a stroke, or perhaps it was a burst blood vessel or even a sign of a brain tumour, the doctor said.

A battery of tests and scans over several weeks found nothing. Still, he could barely see out of his right eye.

Then he was called in to learn the results of a blood test.

Massimo Gavina, pictured in 2016 years before his cancer diagnosis, went to see a doctor with double vision in one eye and subsequently learned he had stage 4 colon cancer.

“The doctor told me my tumour markers were very high. It meant there was cancer activity somewhere in my body, but they didn’t know where. He told me to get a PET scan immediately and to go private because it would take too long in the public system,” said Gavina.

At the Hong Kong Integrated Oncology Centre in Central, he was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer which had spread beyond his digestive tract. Survival time if treated was, on average, two to three years, he was told. Untreated, it was just six months.