Help me raise funds for the Leukaemia Foundation! For those who know me, I have CML. For those who don’t, Hi! I’m Rob and I have Chronic Myeloid Leukaemia! (Not sure why the exclamation point, it’s not exciting at all really!) I was diagnosed in 2015 after thinking I had low iron levels because I felt like I was getting more tired than usual over a period of a couple of months while at work and university. I remember getting a blood test and going in for the results only to be told I had to take this piece of paper and get to emergency immediately because I had cancer – not quite how I imagined my Wednesday morning starting! After debating whether I should go to work later that day because I couldn’t really get my head around the idea of having cancer, I called my mum and it was made pretty clear to me how serious the situation was. I went straight to emergency and when I was rushed in before people who had visible injuries in the waiting room, I started to think “I might be in a bit of trouble here…” What followed was a crazy, whirl-wind period of poking and prodding, blood tests and even a bone marrow sample being taken from my hip (ouch!) to try and determine what exactly was wrong. After 3 days, I was told it was down to two possibilities – Chronic Myeloid Leukaemia (CML), which has a 5 years survival rate (chances of being alive five years after diagnosis) of 90%, and Acute Myeloid Leukaemia (AML), which has a five year survival rate of just 26%. I was 21 at the time and vividly remember lying awake in the hospital bed at 3am thinking to myself “I have a 50/50 chance of either living until I’m 27 and beyond, or potentially not even making it that long”. As I said, I was 21. And Male. And thought I was bullet-proof. This was a shock to my system to say the least. As it turns out, 12 hours later I found out I, thankfully, had CML and not AML. As staff were fussing over me trying to get the right medication and dosage, my mind still hadn’t really comprehended what was going on. In hindsight, I realise I had largely ignored and repressed some of the details because I didn’t want to face or acknowledge them. All I knew was that medication would keep me alive and I wanted to get on with my life – something that wasn’t quite as simple as I would’ve liked as I came to find in the months that followed. Fast forward to today, and I am happy, fit and healthy with very minimal side-effects from my medication, if any at all. However, some people are not so lucky and I feel it’s my time to do something to give back to an organisation who helped me greatly during the worst time in my life. The work the Leukaemia Foundation does is truly amazing and unfortunately it’s often the type of work you never see or even hear about until you, or someone you are close to, needs it. There are accommodation, transportation, educational, emotional support, financial, assessment and referral as well as grief support services available through the foundation, and so many people would be lost without them when they receive life-changing news of the worst kind. Please make a donation, and if you can’t, pass on the details to anyone else who can to help enable the Foundation to continue their amazing work.