Hey, I’m Olly & welcome to my blog.

This is my cancer experience.

I’ve been thinking for months about how to word it the way I felt most comfortable presenting it to others.

Cancer has always affected my life in one way or another since I was very young so I (like many of us) felt like I never really got a “normal” childhood - whatever that means.

My mum has had multiple cancers throughout my life. She’s always been away for surgeries, treatment or work (when she’s not ill).

She moved from QLD to VIC with my 2 little brothers, my little sister & my older sister because not only did she have cancer, my brother was diagnosed with a brain tumor. I still lived in QLD with my dad but I soon moved out & lived with my grandparents for a little over a year (15 months).

During those 15 months, although I still attended the same school & basically had the same friend group I felt alone.

I was the only person around me other than my family that I knew was being affected by cancer.

It was quite scary {difficult technically} seeing my mum; someone that when we’re young, we think of as a mighty-godlike figure, breakdown into tears & have trouble doing things she used to always be about to without an issue become a marathon effort.

Also with my little brother; he would always run around, be full of energy, show off his “muscles” & be a regular 7 year old boy, start having seizures, stuttering, stop remembering things like family members & close friends names.

Feeling like I had nobody to talk too & not really knowing what was going on because I was living 2,448.4kms away without any biological parents made it even more difficult to cope with.

My mental health plummeted & quite a few of my teachers noticed so I was encouraged to go see the school counselor.

I never knew the amount of pressure on my shoulders until I began talking about it to that counselor.

I always thought “there are other people doing it worse. I just have to get over it” but hard is hard. No matter what anyone else is going through, if a situation is difficult for you to deal with, do not hesitate to reach out for help.

After one session with the counselor we both decided that CanTeen would be the best for me to get support during this time.

Getting coping strategies to help during,I guess what you could call ‘recovery’ did take a while.

There were a lot of trail & errors too see what worked well & what didn’t along with many mental setbacks from things like more treatment or stress from check ups & tests that we weren’t really sure what the outcomes would be.

But I got there with the help of many supportive people.

Recovery is difficult but it’s necessary no matter what is going on or happened.

I’m now living in VIC with my mum & sibling, my little brother now just has to have checkups every 6 months to make sure the cancer isn’t growing back again & today mum flew out to go have her second surgery this year.

So yea, that’s my experience with cancer.

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Coping with Cancer

My Cancer Experience