Our Annual Nod To That Day – Diagnosis Day 4 Years Ago

28 Jan Our Annual Nod To That Day – Diagnosis Day 4 Years Ago

Anniversaries are strange things and usually centred around celebration and a sense of triumph. When the anniversary of Felix’s diagnosis looms, I used to feel dread and quite overwhelmed by the enormity of it. This year it’s different. Why? I have no idea and I hope this blog will like they used to do, help me make sense of this milestone.

When Felix was diagnosed on 28th January 2016, our future was obliterated. It felt that all our hopes and dreams for our son and our family were smashed into oblivion. Any sense of a future was stolen from us. As days turned into weeks and weeks into months we realised that life did indeed carry on. It was not the life that we had anticipated but we were living. Now, 39 weeks after the end of treatment, life certainly goes on!

What followed after his end of treatment on 26th April 2019 were weeks of unrivalled excitement and disbelief. Felix rang the bell and we celebrated – boy did we celebrate. Life without chemo. It was amazing – It is amazing! It’s surprising how quickly you do forget but then other things you don’t. Felix mentioned at Christmas this year, having had a rotten cold for a couple of days that he would’ve probably been in hospital over Christmas, had he still been on treatment. He still thinks about it, we all do but we don’t really need to talk about it.

Summer was a tough one. I had heard that life after treatment was tough and knew it would hit but how and when I had no idea. I had a good couple of months when things just weren’t right. I struggled with people and their expectations that ‘everything was back to normal’. I struggled with my feelings and my desire to ‘make everything OK’. Strangely, I struggled with car journeys – my inability to help my children in the back if they needed me became a huge anxiety for me. This posed quite a major head – f**k for me as we travelled over 3000 miles around France and Italy! But we made it and now, 8 months on, our hopes and dreams for the future are following a path, a different path but we’re back on it again!

An important turning point for me was being offered to run the London Marathon 2020 for Children with Cancer UK. I had a new mission, a new challenge and a new distraction! For the first couple of years, establishing my new business around the treatment protocol kept me busy and distracted. Now that we are no longer tied to treatment plans and Go Fish Education is growing from strength to strength, the challenge of the marathon came at just about the right time. I had something else to think about!

Every run I do has an undercurrent of emotion involved. There is the run that I have when I hear that a child we know has relapsed or another child has been diagnosed. Or there are really tough runs when a child has died or experienced a setback. Yet, every single training run is powered by my experience of childhood cancer and what Felix has been through. Every mile I run is to raise awareness and shout as loud as I can about the strength and bravery of our children, their brothers and sisters, their friends and families.

So, please accept my apologies for spamming your feeds and timeline with this over the next couple of months. I’m hoping your support and cheerleading will help me run those 26.2 miles with pure grit and determination but most of all, love!

If you would like to donate to Children with Cancer UK – please do so using the following link: https://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/KerryBrown