Team Hyde's Giving Page

My Story

Team Hyde are doing this for our lovely TA , Tina, here is her story 🥰 My journey began on 30th December 2025, when I suffered the worst migraine I had ever experienced. I ended up in hospital, where I was told I had suffered a brain haemorrhage and a stroke. I was left with weakness down my left side, and I was booked in for an MRI a couple of months later. That MRI changed my life. They found a tumour on my brain. In April, I had a craniotomy to remove it. Thankfully, my surgery went amazingly well. One thing I want other people to know is please don't be frightened of the surgery. The brain itself doesn't feel pain, and I only needed paracetamol afterwards. I was even home after just one night in hospital. The tumour was sitting around my optic nerve, which left me with blindness on the left side of my vision. Thankfully, my vision has continued to improve over the past five months, although it still hasn't fully returned. I'm grateful for the progress I've made, and I'm hopeful that it will continue to improve. And honestly, I'm doing okay. I'm now getting on buses, going shopping on my own and slowly getting my independence back. Then came the news that completely knocked me off my feet. After my surgery, my surgeon thought the tumour was likely to be a grade 2–3. The official results came back as Grade 3 astrocytoma. Cancer. Incurable cancer. My whole world fell apart. I cried constantly. I was terrified. I made myself so ill with worry i had to be medicated because, in my head, incurable meant terminal. But it doesn't. That was the biggest thing I had to learn. Yes, astrocytoma is incurable, and that is incredibly hard to accept. But incurable does not mean terminal. I started to think about it differently — diabetes is also an incurable illness, but people live their lives with it. Once I started to digest everything, I took a deep breath and thought: Okay. I've got this. The tumour was around 3cm and the surgery removed it. I have now finished my six weeks of radiotherapy, which was given to destroy any remaining cancer cells. It was a challenging part of my journey, but I got through it. Now I'm about to start chemotherapy tablets, which I'll take for a year to help stop the cancer from coming back. I'll also have regular MRI scans, every three months, so that if there is ever any sign of regrowth, it can be dealt with as quickly as possible. This is my new normal. And I'm choosing to live. I have four beautiful children — 21, 18, 10 and 7 — who are my absolute world. And just one week after starting radiotherapy, I got married. 💍🩷 Yes, this part of my journey is rubbish. Yes, I have bad days. Yes, sometimes I'm scared. And yes, I've lost my hair. It might seem like a small thing compared with everything else, but losing my hair has been emotional. It has changed the way I look and made my illness feel even more visible. Some days I struggle with it, and that's okay. I'm learning to be kind to myself and remember that my hair does not define me. But I refuse to let cancer take away the life I still have to live. I want to make memories. I want to make a bucket list and start ticking things off. I want to travel, laugh, love, watch my children grow and enjoy every single day I can. I believe that positivity and hope are incredibly powerful. Cancer has already taken enough from me — I'm not going to give it my happiness too. So if you're reading this because you're going through something similar, please remember: One step at a time. One day at a time. You are allowed to be scared. You're allowed to cry. You're allowed to grieve the changes to your body, including losing your hair. But don't forget to look at everything you can still do. You've got this. And I promise, you can smash this and kick cancer's arse. 🩷🎗️ If you've chosen to support me through this journey, thank you from the bottom of my heart. Every donation, share and kind message means more to me and my family than I could ever explain. My colleagues at the school where I work asked if they could do the walk to show their support for me, and I absolutely love that. I wanted to do it with them, and we're doing this not only as colleagues, but as friends. I'm doing this walk not just for myself, but for all the people I have met on my cancer journey who, like me, are living with this horrible disease. I'm walking with the hope that one day a cure will be found and the words “you have cancer” will no longer be so heartbreaking. Here's to more living, more memories and a whole lot more life. 🩷