'There are moments which mark your life. Moments when you realise that nothing will ever be the same and time is divided into two parts, before this and after this.' - John Hobbes, Fallen.
My first blog post was in January 2014 and my last in November 2014. The same year I started my blog, I also stopped it.
There were a number of reasons for this, but the main one was that I needed space and time to think; to go over and deal with everything that had happened through the publicity of my blog. In just a few months of setting up and writing a handful of posts about my experience of having cancer, I was contacted by a press agency and not long after that my blog link and story was being published online by multiple newspapers. I was being contacted by radio stations and journalists wanting to hear about my experience first hand and along with this came emails filled with questions from others who had been recently diagnosed or who were currently undergoing treatment for cancer.
The hardest message I received was from a young woman, not much older than me and all she asked, the only thing that she wanted to know was how could she beat the cancer, how could she survive? She was a mother to a young child and she was relying on me to help her and I didn't even know how or what to reply with. Eventually I did and I was completely honest with her. One thing I learnt from having cancer is that it's toxic. It enters your body and it slowly tries to take over every little part of you, from your blood to the way you think and if, even for a second, you start to think that you can't do this any more, or that the cancer is going to kill you anyway... it just might. A couple of months later, I learnt that she'd passed away. I don't know who decides in this world who gets to live and who doesn't. Why should a young woman, with a child, with so much love to give and so much hope and trust to teach them, why should they not have the chance to live their life? I don't understand it and I don't think I ever will. But I hope that her child knows how brave she was. That she fought to stay in their life, but it just didn't turn out the way she wanted.
There were a number of reasons for this, but the main one was that I needed space and time to think; to go over and deal with everything that had happened through the publicity of my blog. In just a few months of setting up and writing a handful of posts about my experience of having cancer, I was contacted by a press agency and not long after that my blog link and story was being published online by multiple newspapers. I was being contacted by radio stations and journalists wanting to hear about my experience first hand and along with this came emails filled with questions from others who had been recently diagnosed or who were currently undergoing treatment for cancer.
The hardest message I received was from a young woman, not much older than me and all she asked, the only thing that she wanted to know was how could she beat the cancer, how could she survive? She was a mother to a young child and she was relying on me to help her and I didn't even know how or what to reply with. Eventually I did and I was completely honest with her. One thing I learnt from having cancer is that it's toxic. It enters your body and it slowly tries to take over every little part of you, from your blood to the way you think and if, even for a second, you start to think that you can't do this any more, or that the cancer is going to kill you anyway... it just might. A couple of months later, I learnt that she'd passed away. I don't know who decides in this world who gets to live and who doesn't. Why should a young woman, with a child, with so much love to give and so much hope and trust to teach them, why should they not have the chance to live their life? I don't understand it and I don't think I ever will. But I hope that her child knows how brave she was. That she fought to stay in their life, but it just didn't turn out the way she wanted.
Receiving emails like this and learning that you can't help people who are turning to you for help is and will always be one of the worst feelings I've experienced. But this doesn't mean that I don't want to know. I set up my blog to help others, to give a first hand, honest account of what it was like for me, from the diagnosis, to the treatment and finally to remission. There is no right or wrong. There's no one treatment that will work for everybody. There's nothing that you can or can't do that'll increase or decrease your risk of being diagnosed with cancer. So if you're reading my blog and you want to get in touch, you are more than welcome to send me an email, because there is nothing worse than thinking that there is nobody there. That there's nobody who you can talk to or simply talk at, because there is.
I will continue to carry on with my blogging, but there is no set number of posts I aim to put up in a week, it will be as and when. But I will be putting up a post about what's involved with a bone marrow biopsy soon.
I will continue to carry on with my blogging, but there is no set number of posts I aim to put up in a week, it will be as and when. But I will be putting up a post about what's involved with a bone marrow biopsy soon.
