As a 13-year-old Bristol boy, Paul Burden was given just an hour's notice that he had bone cancer and would lose his left leg.

From that date in 1974 fate would strike him three more times in his lungs, cheek and right arm.

Tumours, 12 in all, were removed from his lungs in 1976 and a carcinoma in his cheek led to another operation in 2007.

His arm, amputated in April after an infection that almost cost him his life, was the last and perhaps the cruellest blow.

Because by this stage Paul, now 49, had discovered hand cycling, which had given him a new lease of life.

He said: "I discovered hand cycling and it was the most liberating experience for me. The bikes were just fantastic and I just had to have one. It gave me such freedom."

Paul was thrilled when his employer Orange at Aztec West in Almondsbury, where he works as a enterprise architect for business intelligence, agreed to buy him a hand bike.

He set out with vigour to raise £500,000 for Cancer Research by making the trip from Land's End to John O'Groats.

But the flesh eating infection – necrotising fasciitis – that struck whilst on a family holiday in Cornwall and resulted in the loss of his right arm shattered that dream surely?

"Oh no, I'm looking to get a bike which will be one where you steer with your hand and cycle with one leg," Paul added.

"It will be difficult and I need to do about 18 months training, so I'm hoping to do it in 2011 with good friend Steve Hawkins.

"The usual trip is 857 miles but I am determined to visit children's cancer units so I can talk to them on the way, so I expect to do over 1,000 miles in all."

Paul has an incredible strength of spirit which makes his determination to complete the feat unsurprising.

Remembering his roller coaster life from the beginning, Paul, who lives with wife Clare, daughter Lucy, six, and son Harry, four, said: "My leg hurt. I had been play fighting with my brother and my leg was badly bruised.

"It hurt because the bruise was directly over the tumour.

In a way it was lucky because the cancer may have spread to my hip, which would have made the operation more difficult."

Not that it wasn't difficult. Young and not really understanding what was going on, Paul heard from his surgeon that he would be losing his leg while his "incredibly supportive" parents looked on.

"Will I be a cripple for the rest of my life?" Paul asked the surgeon. The surgeon replied: "I don't like that word. You will be able to do pretty much anything if you want to."

These words, although seemingly harsh, were just what Paul needed and he lived life by that rule.

"Those were very good words for me to hear," Paul said.

"Just three months after I had lost my leg I walked up to Thornton Force waterfall in Yorkshire, which is around a three-mile round trip, on crutches.

"I did my O-Levels and A-Levels, although two of these were a year late because of time I was off ill and went on to do geology at Oxford and did all the necessary coursework."

By this time Paul had undergone pioneering surgery to remove tumours that had appeared in each lung.

Although the operation was terrifying, it is the chemotherapy at the Bristol Hospital for Sick Children on St Michael's Hill which sticks in his mind.

"The worst part was definitely the chemotherapy," Paul said. " This was the 1970s and it was fairly new and aggressive.

"I would go in every three weeks and be really ill afterwards, have a week of feeling pretty good and then a week of dreading the next dose.

"I always would go in on a Friday and Thursday nights I would always watch MASH on television in a bid to cheer me up – that show was very important to me."

Amazingly, Paul doesn't feel that his experience up to this point affected his life negatively.

"I have done loads of stuff – I don't really feel my leg has detracted from my life," he said. "It actually gave me a different perspective that some people don't get.

"I sometimes look back and think I may not have been as confident as I could have been as a teenager but I think a lot of people do that."

Then in 2006 fate struck again. First his father died from lymphoma and soon afterwards Paul was diagnosed with cancer again.

"It was very hard for me to think of dad having to go through chemotherapy because he was always such a good friend to me," Paul said

"I had an ulcer in my cheek but it didn't go away and wasn't painful, which should have been a sign,

"I left it longer than I should have and when I went to the doctor it was diagnosed as a carcinoma."

Thus followed painful and lengthy surgery which involved taking a 2in by 2.5in flap of flesh complete with vein and artery from his right wrist and placing it inside his cheek with teeth having to be removed.

"Again it was completely out of the blue," Paul said.

But as we know, Paul's problems didn't stop there and in April he had his right arm amputated.

"I had pain in my arm but I really thought I had just pulled a muscle," he said. "You wouldn't really believe I could be that unlucky again."

Gone were the days of racing round the block at Aztec West seven or eight times on his hand bike or the trips out on it in the countryside around his home which he loved so much.

But nothing can stop this man and it's hard to believe he can fail in his quest to travel the length of Britain.

"I don't care how many limbs I have left, I will complete this, that's just the way I am," he concluded.