Councillor Rob Ford says he is “99 per cent sure” his cancer is back and he is ready to restart chemotherapy.

“We’re praying that it’s benign but you’ve got to deal with the realistic part of things and (be) 99 per cent sure that it’s malignant,” an emotional Ford said Thursday outside Mount Sinai Hospital, after consulting with doctors about the new tumour pushing on his bladder.

“It’s emotional,” he said. “I worked so hard to get to this point. I was getting in better shape, I was feeling great, better than I ever have in my life, and now I’m just right back to square one. I have to start all over.”

The former Toronto mayor said he is “optimistic, but I’m a realist too. If this has spread once, where else has it gone?

“If I pass before my time, I just ask people to please try to help out (his young children) Dougie and Stephanie and (wife) Renata in any way you can . . . It’s not good, it’s not good at all, but all I can do is fight. I’ll fight and I won’t stop fighting until the day I die.”

Ford expects to hear this week if the tumour is malignant. Doctors say it is “consistent” with the rare and aggressive pleomorphic liposarcoma they removed from his abdomen in May, Ford said.

He hopes that two rounds of chemo will make the tumour operable by the end of December. “That’s my Christmas gift,” he said. If five rounds are required to shrink the tumour, surgery would likely happen next spring, he added.

Ford, who still wears an abdominal bind and drain from the 10-hour May surgery, said he started feeling excruciating shooting pain in his right torso about a month ago. Tests done last week revealed the new growth, which may be attached to his bladder or just pushing up against it.

Although he is preparing to begin chemo at Mount Sinai next week, Ford said he is considering seeking further unspecified treatment in either New York or Texas.

The five-year survival rate for pleomorphic liposarcoma, a cancer of the connective tissues, is 56 per cent, according to the Liddy Shriver Sarcoma Initiative, based in Ossining, N.Y. The rate drops to 39 per cent at the 10-year mark.

Last fall Dr. Walter Longo, chief of gastrointestinal surgery at Yale University, told the Star, regarding someone in Ford’s position, “If they can get all the disease out surgically . . . he’ll have about a 50/50 chance of beating it.”

A grim-faced Doug Ford, the councillor’s brother and best friend, emerged first from the meeting with doctors Thursday and spoke briefly to reporters.

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The fight is “going to be tougher this time, a lot tougher,” said Doug Ford, calling the latest news “shattering.”

Rob Ford was forced to drop his mayoral re-election bid last September. He was handily re-elected in Ward 2 Etobicoke North while his brother, who replaced him in the mayoral race, came second to John Tory.

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