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Dennis Inggs with wife Sara and kids Ethan (6yrs), Yasmin (4yrs) and Kai (9mths) at the Cancer Care Apartments. Source: Sam Ruttyn / News Limited
THEY don't tell time by the clock out on the rice farms down near Griffith.
Each morning Dennis Inggs would be on the tractor by the time Ray Hadley came on radio and he'd work through two hours of Hadley and then Alan Jones until noon.
"Then you'd have lunch," he says.
A fortnight ago on Tuesday, he had had enough of this pain in his side and took himself to the doctors, telling him his ribs were playing up.
His X-ray found a lump that sent him for a CAT scan the following day.
By Friday he was at St George Hospital for more tests and, last Tuesday, they told him he had stage four melanoma, which is as bad as it can get.
A tumour the size of a grapefruit in his lung, causing the pain, and seven small tumours on his brain.
Dennis Inggs is 30.
The doctor told him they would try to help him make it to December, when his fourth baby is due.
"I didn't like his verdict," Dennis says.
"I said, 'Don't give me that until I'm in the ground. Until then I'm fine'."
How he got it he doesn't know. He had skin checks every 12 months and they still can't find a lesion. Doctors suspect it might have entered his blood through his retinas.
Dennis and wife Sara have three kids, Ethan, 6, Yasmin, 4, and Kai, 9 months.
He did what every good man would do and he thought about his family. And what makes a family, he thought, but memories.
So he wrote to Hadley and told him he wanted to create some memories that his children, still so young, might retain as they got older.
He asked if Hadley could him get tickets to Wednesday's State of Origin. Something big the kids might remember.
"I know it's pretty special, it's a decider," Hadley said.
Dennis said: "It might be the last one I ever see."
Hadley did more than organise the game.
On Monday, Dennis and Sara, and Sara's brother Travis, attended the Blues' traditional last dinner.
Coach Laurie Daley got Dennis to present Boyd Cordner with his debutant's medal, then say a few words.
"Which I tried not to get too emotional about," he says.
Bravery, we know, comes in all forms.
For years Dennis and Travis, just 20 himself and playing in the local competition, have watched the likes of Paul Gallen and Robbie Farah, Greg Bird and Mitch Pearce, pick themselves up and go again.
What they do as footballers is brave, it really is, requiring a commitment and discipline few can handle. That is why Origin is the best of the best.
For others, bravery is how they handle their situation.
That is what Dennis must do, and in their own way what the Blues must do Wednesday. It is what they kept seeing in Dennis on Monday night.
"But you don't look sick," a couple of players said to him.
And he doesn't feel sick. Instead, his choice was to enjoy his night. Travis sat next to Gallen. Daley made sure Sara felt part of it all. Dennis kept looking around the room at all these names he reads about and sees on TV hardly believing he was there.
"It was like going to a family barbecue where you knew everybody," he says.
"My wife was so accepted. Travis next to Gal ... "
After presenting Cordner with his medal, Dennis spoke about playing for more than just 80 minutes of football.
He didn't know if they realised, he told them, but Origin was more than them on the field for 80 minutes.
Ethan follows the Bulldogs and Sara is a Storm fan. Dennis has always been a Raiders man.
"But we all go for the Blues," he said.
"That's the time we come together. We try to make a tradition of it as a family."
For how long and in what form that tradition will take is now uncertain.
"I might not see next year's Origin," he says.
Dennis has already asked Travis to help raise his kids when he is gone.
On Wednesday he will visit the Melanoma Institute in North Sydney hoping, as late as his cancer is, new trial treatments might prolong his diagnosis. It is the most important day in the rest of his life.
"They've got a new treatment that is attacking the genetic mutation instead of the cancer," he says.
"I've got an appointment to see if they can offer me that, if I have the right type of cancer.
"It could be months, mate, it could be years."
Then later Wednesday night a limousine organised by Hadley will pick them up and take them to Origin, where Daley wants them on the sideline with the players during the game.
"It's going to be special, mate," he says.
"Very, very, very special."
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