A Long Way To Go

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!!