rivers2cross

This month marks 10 years of my fundraising. The anniversary gives me a chance to reflect upon and acknowledge the impact it has had on my own life.

It all began on November 25th 2012 when I published the Beating Bowel Cancer book. It was a couple of months after Mum’s bowel operation, and I’d found the Beating Bowel Cancer charity and thought it all tied up perfectly. At the time I had no intention of it being anything other than just a one-off charity project. Little did I realise just how much my life would change as a result and still be here doing it 10 years later x

Back then I knew very little about bowel cancer, metastatic cancer, staging or even the importance of raising awareness. I think sometimes it’s all too easy to forget that people being diagnosed with bowel cancer have little knowledge of the disease, which only goes to serve the importance of raising awareness.

The book did really well on Amazon, especially the Kindle edition. What I hadn’t expected was the kindness and support that I began to receive from complete strangers. The friendships that were built back then and I continue to make today have been totally life changing. Many of you reading this fall into this wonderful of beautiful friendships. I am a very different person to the one that published Beating Bowel Cancer. It is this human aspect that is the very core reason as to why I became involved in the community for the long term.

Thankfully, Mum got to see much of my fundraising. It was heart-breaking to lose her in 2016, but I firmly believe that the greatest gift she left me was the fundraising and the positive changes in me as a result x She was a private person as far as her bowel cancer went. She preferred to get through each challenge, which she saw as a nuisance and keep her focus on returning to normality afterwards as soon as she could. I did manage to get her to be in the publicity we got for the Beating Bowel Cancer book.

Beating Bowel Cancer raised about £500 and I soon learnt the value of raising awareness as much as the actual fundraising. The book remains on Amazon and everything that has happened over the last 10 years simply wouldn’t have happened without it xx