While school is now over for another term and it's time for a bit of a rest, I'm overwhelmed by a strong, crushing feeling. Even though I have persevered through the last couple of months of school, all I can think about is that I have another 2 years, minimum, before my treatment ends. It's all very well, breaking chemotherapy up into blocks and batches and being able to tick off the stages as I go, but the cold hard facts are that my treatment ends on the 24th of December, 2015. Sometimes that seems almost insurmountable.
I've had Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia for about 15 months now and the finish line is no where in sight! By the time my treatment ends, if all goes to plan, I'll be at University which feels like it's so many years away and relies on a good deal of fortune falling my way. I know it is incredibly important to try and keep positive and I've waxed lyrical about setting yourself daily targets, but at this time in the year, it's tough. Only today I was told about how fantastic it is that Leukaemia now has an 80% chance of being cured through the first cycle of treatment, but if that treatment is going to take 3 years, sometimes I wonder how fantastic that really is?! I was told something back in my Birmingham days that will stay with me forever and ever. We look back on surgery that occurred 100 years ago, even 50 years ago, not quite believing how and why we used such primitive tools to roughly mould and manipulate our bodies to "fix" them. Well, in 50 years time, I hope people look back at our "barbaric" methods of curing cancer which I can be break down into: slashing out tumours with scalpels, destroying our own healthy flesh and blood with chemotherapy and finally burning our physically weak bodies with radiation to "cure" ourselves. I hope in 50 years people look back and think, "Thank God it's not like that now and we realised how to beat cancer without losing ourselves to the treatment first."
While this post is particularly downbeat and I do apologise for that as it's so close to Christmas, I am not despondent. Recent success at school always manages to keep my chin up and my nose down to the grindstone!
I'm not sure how much I'll post throughout the holiday but I'll definitely be back at the start of the New Year. I'll alert via twitter at @Will_smith09
Happy Christmas!!
Thursday 19 December 2013
Monday 16 December 2013
Quick Update
Apologies to all, but I'm feeling really rough today from chemo followed up by a batch of steroids this morning. My sister commented that I look like a ghost! On the plus side my blood counts are going in the right direction so my chin is firmly up. Early night for me I think though!
Wednesday 11 December 2013
Pencil it in
As is seemingly the case with many of my posts, this one is a huge thank you to the Teenage Cancer Trust. I was asked last week if I would like to be entered into a prize draw to win the chance to watch a celebrity football match organised by Nick Grimshaw and BBC Radio 1. Incredibly, I won the tickets and so on Monday I took a train up to London with a friend and stayed the night in a hotel near Wembley, ready for an early rise.
We had to be at the stadium at 7:45am, but thankfully were greeted with bacon sandwiches as well as an assortment of continental breakfasts. While food is very important to me, it was still way too early to be arriving anywhere! The match was an exclusive event, with around 50 people in the stands, all of whom were guests of either Radio 1, Olly Murs or the Teenage Cancer Trust. After a dramatic encounter, which required a penalty shoot out to decide the fate of the game, the celebrities took pictures with us and chatted for about half an hour. I recognised and took photographs with many famous faces including, Andrew "Freddie" Flintoff, Rizzle Kicks, John Bishop, Olly Murs, Made In Chelsea's Jamie Laing and of course Nick Grimshaw himself!
The whole trip, from the hectic train journeys to the early Tuesday morning get up, was fantastic. I need to say a huge thank you once more to the Teenage Cancer Trust who offer these days of respite amid long treatments to teenagers all over the country. They are a real help and provide opportunities of independence as well as the obvious enjoyment that events such as this give.
However, none of this might even have been possible. I was scheduled to receive a Lumbar Puncture on the Tuesday of the football match and so at the time I was crushingly disappointed that I couldn't even apply for the tickets. However, my LP was rescheduled due to circumstances out of my control and in doing so, meant that I was available to visit Wembley and have an incredible time. I'm trying to show how no plans can ever be set in stone due to various treatments and the ever changing nature of them. However, it cannot be overestimated just how much the respites organised by the Teenage Cancer Trust are valued and how important they are in providing pick me ups especially when it feels that treatment is beginning to get on top of you.
We had to be at the stadium at 7:45am, but thankfully were greeted with bacon sandwiches as well as an assortment of continental breakfasts. While food is very important to me, it was still way too early to be arriving anywhere! The match was an exclusive event, with around 50 people in the stands, all of whom were guests of either Radio 1, Olly Murs or the Teenage Cancer Trust. After a dramatic encounter, which required a penalty shoot out to decide the fate of the game, the celebrities took pictures with us and chatted for about half an hour. I recognised and took photographs with many famous faces including, Andrew "Freddie" Flintoff, Rizzle Kicks, John Bishop, Olly Murs, Made In Chelsea's Jamie Laing and of course Nick Grimshaw himself!
The whole trip, from the hectic train journeys to the early Tuesday morning get up, was fantastic. I need to say a huge thank you once more to the Teenage Cancer Trust who offer these days of respite amid long treatments to teenagers all over the country. They are a real help and provide opportunities of independence as well as the obvious enjoyment that events such as this give.
However, none of this might even have been possible. I was scheduled to receive a Lumbar Puncture on the Tuesday of the football match and so at the time I was crushingly disappointed that I couldn't even apply for the tickets. However, my LP was rescheduled due to circumstances out of my control and in doing so, meant that I was available to visit Wembley and have an incredible time. I'm trying to show how no plans can ever be set in stone due to various treatments and the ever changing nature of them. However, it cannot be overestimated just how much the respites organised by the Teenage Cancer Trust are valued and how important they are in providing pick me ups especially when it feels that treatment is beginning to get on top of you.
Thursday 5 December 2013
Making the Right Choice
This time last year I had a pretty difficult decision to make, I could knuckle down with my studies and try to get the grades required to participate in some of this year's Year 13 classes, or the other option would be to retake the whole of Year 12. I knew that from February, I'd have another 2 months outside of school due to my second batch of intensive treatment at the very least. At the time I was only attending school purely for the social element. After spending so long in hospital away from everyone, I wanted to catch up on everything that I had missed out on and immerse myself in the everyday dramas and dilemmas. My school was incredibly tolerant, but there came a point when I decided that I must decide on what I wanted to achieve by the end of the year, instead of simply relaxing each day among friends.
One side of me wanted to spend each day enjoying myself, doing the things I loved, but I could recognise that I was effectively keeping myself further and further behind everyone else. Therefore, I decided, with my parents and teachers, to structure a plan of what I should be aiming to achieve by the end of the year. I could see that the ramifications of me not working hard would be that all my friends would be in their final year of school, while I was left back in my first year of Sixth Form. This would have been very difficult for me to deal with, so my aim was to attain the right grades in at least one subject, to be able to stay with my friends in one class for this academic year.
Over the course of the year I massively struggled to stay motivated. Almost daily I would consider giving up and I would question the whole point of carrying on if I wasn't enjoying it. However, I persevered. My mum used to tell my sister and I, that the key to almost everything is "Perseverance and Persistence". It would be a complete lie to say that I just thought of those words and gritted my teeth. I just don't work like that. I needed a lot of pushing and shoving by teachers, friends and family alike to get me over the finish line with my English work, but by God am I grateful for it now!
I managed to obtain the result that I needed for me to continue with English for this year and am now so relieved that I made that choice all those months ago. Sadly, I cannot say that nowadays I strive to do the absolute best in all pieces of work that I hand in and that sometimes I don't doubt myself and the need to work hard. There is still that question in my mind of what the point to it all really is, who knows where I will be in a years time. However, what I am sure of is that when I got my result for my English exam, it was the absolute highlight of my year.
One side of me wanted to spend each day enjoying myself, doing the things I loved, but I could recognise that I was effectively keeping myself further and further behind everyone else. Therefore, I decided, with my parents and teachers, to structure a plan of what I should be aiming to achieve by the end of the year. I could see that the ramifications of me not working hard would be that all my friends would be in their final year of school, while I was left back in my first year of Sixth Form. This would have been very difficult for me to deal with, so my aim was to attain the right grades in at least one subject, to be able to stay with my friends in one class for this academic year.
Over the course of the year I massively struggled to stay motivated. Almost daily I would consider giving up and I would question the whole point of carrying on if I wasn't enjoying it. However, I persevered. My mum used to tell my sister and I, that the key to almost everything is "Perseverance and Persistence". It would be a complete lie to say that I just thought of those words and gritted my teeth. I just don't work like that. I needed a lot of pushing and shoving by teachers, friends and family alike to get me over the finish line with my English work, but by God am I grateful for it now!
I managed to obtain the result that I needed for me to continue with English for this year and am now so relieved that I made that choice all those months ago. Sadly, I cannot say that nowadays I strive to do the absolute best in all pieces of work that I hand in and that sometimes I don't doubt myself and the need to work hard. There is still that question in my mind of what the point to it all really is, who knows where I will be in a years time. However, what I am sure of is that when I got my result for my English exam, it was the absolute highlight of my year.
Monday 2 December 2013
Planning Ahead
As I've alluded to in the post "Off to University", cancer ended up affecting almost every single presupposed decision I had made towards my future. I wasn't 100% certain about my plans after school, but I knew that I wanted to study Philosophy and Ethics, History and English Literature at A2 and then go onto University, probably without a gap year in between and then get a job in TV Broadcasting or writing in some form, at a newspaper or magazine maybe. I wanted to take a gap year in between University and finding a job, but I was mulling over the idea of interRailing, the summer after Year 13 with some friends. The point that I'm trying to convey is, that I had a plan. I had an idea of which direction my life was headed in and while cancer hasn't completely altered that, it has caused some pretty major set backs.
Cancer has meant that a lot of my plans have been put on hold such as interRailing at the end of this school year, or applying to University this year. However, it's not just the obvious things that make the future difficult to plan for. The psychological impact of having cancer makes applying to University's and employment a very daunting task. The CLIC sargent charity have recently released a report about how cancer affects young people's feelings towards their futures and I have attached the link to the bottom of the post if anyone is interested in reading in further detail. However, with statistics such as 74% of the people in the survey being worried about future employment and 75% stating that a lack of confidence is a significant barrier in finding a job, it is clear that the psychological problems created by cancer are very difficult to break down and overcome at this age. I would be lying if I said that I am not scared about employment in the future. What if my cancer stops me from getting the job I want? Or worse still, if it is the reason that I do get the job? I don't want my cancer to be the only thing that I am judged upon!
However, these are all long term consequences of having cancer. The short term ones are equally difficult to deal with. The threat that a common cold could significantly hold up my treatment, is forever looming over me and a constant consideration in all my actions. I have to be so careful not to drink too much and my diet is meant to consist of at least 9 portions of fruit and vegetable per day. I have to think about almost everything I do in relation to how it will affect my treatment and that means that while I can give the appearance of always being happy and well, it is ever present in my thoughts and actions. It never ever goes away and not for one moment can I get complete respite from it.
However, there are some things that I can do to help my future, three important guidelines that I can follow to make sure that I am as well prepared as I can be. They consist of: eating healthily, sleeping well and exercising! Simple to follow but ultimately they could shape how the rest of my treatment goes. At 17 though, it's important to be realistic with my aims so I'll definitely be taking baby steps, especially with 9 portions of fruit and veg per day!
The CLIC sargent report: http://www.clicsargent.org.uk/sites/files/clicsargent/13092a_No_young_person_with_cancer_left_out.pdf
Cancer has meant that a lot of my plans have been put on hold such as interRailing at the end of this school year, or applying to University this year. However, it's not just the obvious things that make the future difficult to plan for. The psychological impact of having cancer makes applying to University's and employment a very daunting task. The CLIC sargent charity have recently released a report about how cancer affects young people's feelings towards their futures and I have attached the link to the bottom of the post if anyone is interested in reading in further detail. However, with statistics such as 74% of the people in the survey being worried about future employment and 75% stating that a lack of confidence is a significant barrier in finding a job, it is clear that the psychological problems created by cancer are very difficult to break down and overcome at this age. I would be lying if I said that I am not scared about employment in the future. What if my cancer stops me from getting the job I want? Or worse still, if it is the reason that I do get the job? I don't want my cancer to be the only thing that I am judged upon!
However, these are all long term consequences of having cancer. The short term ones are equally difficult to deal with. The threat that a common cold could significantly hold up my treatment, is forever looming over me and a constant consideration in all my actions. I have to be so careful not to drink too much and my diet is meant to consist of at least 9 portions of fruit and vegetable per day. I have to think about almost everything I do in relation to how it will affect my treatment and that means that while I can give the appearance of always being happy and well, it is ever present in my thoughts and actions. It never ever goes away and not for one moment can I get complete respite from it.
However, there are some things that I can do to help my future, three important guidelines that I can follow to make sure that I am as well prepared as I can be. They consist of: eating healthily, sleeping well and exercising! Simple to follow but ultimately they could shape how the rest of my treatment goes. At 17 though, it's important to be realistic with my aims so I'll definitely be taking baby steps, especially with 9 portions of fruit and veg per day!
The CLIC sargent report: http://www.clicsargent.org.uk/sites/files/clicsargent/13092a_No_young_person_with_cancer_left_out.pdf
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