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Team Sparkle are on a health a Fitness Journey! Each of us has different goals and expectations about what a healthy and happy life looks like and we are joining together to help motivate each other. We want to start a chain reaction where people will begin remembering what a gift life is and the importance of living it to the fullest.
I have been trying to be successful in this endeavour my entire life, but now having beaten cancer, I have this second chance and if there was ever going to be a motivator I would not give up on, it would be the Leukaemia Foundation, because they didn't give up on me and I know without a shadow of a doubt that I wouldn't be here, having this second chance had it not been for them. So join me and lets all share our journeys. Whether you’re working on health and fitness because you’re honouring a loved one who has been touched by cancer or whether you’re doing this for your own personal reasons. It’s a celebration of life and love. We only get one life and life is not a given, it’s a gift and we need to milk every moment of it. It took fighting cancer to make me realise this, don't wait for something terrifying to happen to make you live the life you want to live. So join me on my Team and let’s smash our goals and rock this life
A bit about my journey:
In 2015 I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease. After being sick for three months, the doctors finally started to believe I actually was sick and did a chest x-ray where they found a large lump sitting between my heart and lungs. Fast forward two weeks later, I am in hospital receiving my first round of chemotherapy. Due to the advanced stage of my cancer I started my first chemo cycle an hour after diagnosis. I was devastated. I had a wedding coming up in a few months’ time that I would ideally like to have hair for and be alive for. I also couldn’t visit a fertility doctor to discuss what kind of safety net I could put in place in order to bare life beyond my own if chemo took away that gift from me. Little did I know that in just a couple of months these wouldn’t be the soul destroying issues I thought they would be and they would be replaced by bigger ones.
Fast forward a couple more months. I was waiting outside my home, my one safe place in this world, waiting to be driven to chemo when I had my relationship, engagement and entire support system break down. I lost everything that day. My love, my home and the family I had loved for almost 8 years. I don’t know how I made it to the hospital that day, I was so distraught and broken that I could hardly breathe. I walked into the cancer centre looking like a mess and burst out crying the minute the nurses saw me. As soul destroying as this day was, I have to tell you this is the day that I truly started to see the beautiful hearts of the people around me. The nurses at chemo hugged me, cried with me and went well beyond the call of duty and I wouldn’t have survived that day without them. My beautiful bestie Chloe dropped everything to come to me and she reminded me that there was still love and light in the world, which was a bigger gift than you can imagine.
Despite having friends around me and so much support from the beautiful nurses at Fiona Stanley, I still felt depressed and like I had nothing to live for. The doctors had to cancel a couple of chemo cycles because my heart wasn’t pumping enough blood, which meant my body was too weak to be able to handle chemotherapy. This is when I really started to believe what they meant when they say someone is “fighting cancer”. If your heart isn’t in it, you don’t have a chance. And at that point, my heart wasn’t in it. I made out a will, I wrote letters to the special people in my life and prepared for what I thought was the inevitable. I was terrified of how down I felt and how flat I had become. I pretty much broke down and started weighing up life and the reasons to be in it or out of it. Ultimately I picked in it. I’m a naturally optimistic person in general, so for me to get that deep into despair, I knew I needed some professional help.
The leukaemia foundation, thanks to donations, are able to offer free counselling to patients and relatives. I was able to take advantage of this and thank god I did, because it turned everything right around for me! I had never felt more validated and empowered than I had after that first appointment and from there, there was no looking back!
Fast forward again and I have kicked cancers arse, I am in remission and I have loads of beautiful friends in my life that have been my personal cheer squad through the entire process!
But remission doesn’t mean the end. It means getting used to your new normal. While you are over the moon that you survived cancer you now have a new set of worries. Like fear and anxiety, which can be overwhelming and debilitating if you let them. Irrational thoughts can run through your head, like, is it better to have cancer and live in hope or be in remission and live in fear? These are thoughts that fill the deepest darkest corners of your mind and come to the surface whenever you go back to the cancer centre for a check-up, which for the first two years of remission is every two months. At first I thought I was crazy and was really hard on myself that I felt this way. I felt like I didn’t deserve to survive if I wasn’t going to be this giant ball of happiness after I was done fighting it. These feelings of not being worthy of living only added to my anxieties. I finally spoke to someone about it and they said that these feelings were completely normal and that often people were more stressed once they were in remission. The thing is, if you have never had cancer, you don’t have to worry as much about getting it, but if you’ve had it, you worry about it coming back. Enter the Leukaemia Foundation! You guessed it, they offer counselling and support to people in remission too, because beating cancer completely is beating it in mind, body and soul!
I owe a lot to the Leukaemia Foundation, they aided in my survival in every way possible and without them I wouldn’t be here today. There have been some pretty profound silver linings throughout this whole process, silver linings I wouldn’t be lucky enough to see had it not been for the help the leukaemia foundation was able to give me, thanks to the donations of many selfless strangers xx