Jenny's Fundraising Page

Because cancer can f*ck right off 💪

My Story

This isn’t Cancer This is Dad, this is Mum, this is my sister, this is my best friend. ⌚TL:DR: I lost my dad to cancer in 2008, just 10 months after diagnosis. In 2024 my best friend Hayley was diagnosed. My mum’s diagnosis followed in early 2025 and then my little sister a few months later. Everyone's battle is different but the enemy is the same: that's why I'm trying to raise money so that more people win their fight. I'm going for a 26 mile, 11+ hour walk overnight through London. It's going to be hard, tiring and painful, but not as hard, tiring and painful as cancer. Please sponsor me if you can! 🙏 When I was 19, I did my first ever Race for Life, for no better reason than, ‘because why not’. I distinctly remember making my fundraising page, copy-and-pasting the RFL generic message onto my page and adding a ‘personal’ note along the lines of, “cancer is a total bitch and while it hasn’t affected me yet…” blah blah blah. My best friend Hayley and I donned our bright pink t-shirts, laced up our trainers and took a pleasant stroll through London before collecting our medals and merrily consuming disproportionately large portions of burgers and wine because exercise. My experience of cancer was entirely informed by TV and film: baldness, aesthetically-shot vomiting and the occasional smoking of a really big spliff. I knew people died (hello, Dr Greene on ER, still the saddest TV death ever IMO) and I knew sometimes people lived, however improbably (looking at you, Izzie from Grey’s Anatomy). And sometimes they just smoked really big spliffs (the only lasting impression I have of Susan Sarandon’s character in Stepmom). Cancer was something awful, but in an abstract, not-my-problem sort of way. So I downloaded that nice version of Somewhere Over the Rainbow they played at Dr Greene’s funeral, valiantly strolled 5k around London and didn’t worry too much about it. A year later my dad got a really bad headache. And cancer became something new. It became treatment that made him unrecognisable, a surgery that gave him a permanent bobble under the skin on his bald head. Baldness, yes, that was there, only it didn’t look the same way as it did on TV. There were no flattering angles and shining eyes. There were scars and weakness and steroids that blew up his body and shattered his vertebrae. And then, less than a year on, it was over, all too shockingly, all too suddenly. Dad, metastatic lung. Diagnosed July 2007, died June 2008 💔. That was my cancer story for a while. Then just two years ago it came for my best friend, the very same Hayley whose idea the first RFL walk was in the first place. And cancer became something else. It became brutal, fast treatment, incredible resilience, a twisting fear that if it could come for her, it could come for any of us. But it also became something that could be defeated. Something that could be beaten back down with strength, medicine and an iron will. Hayley, Hodgkin lymphoma. Diagnosed April 2024, cancer free since June 2024 🥂. A year passed. Not quite two. Then my mum. A slow, festering beast which started before my dad even got his first headache. And cancer became terrifying again. Brutal, life-robbing weakness, a haunting cough, unbearable frailty. Odds to defy. It has slowed down, it has fallen back and it has slowly returned. But it hasn’t won. She is currently undergoing second-line chemotherapy treatment and remains staunchly determined to, in her own words, “get the bugger.” Mum, pleural mesothelioma. Diagnosed March 2025. Still fighting the bugger 💪 Just as Mum finished her first-line chemo, my younger sister had a minor procedure to remove endometriosis. It ended in a hysterectomy and a pathology report which contained the words no one, not even the surgeon, had expected - ovarian cancer, stage 3B. Tiny grains of evil shaken from her very core to land everywhere. Cancer became a nine-hour surgery called debulking - a name that sounds like it belongs in a factory full of heavy machinery rather than an operating theatre. Entire organs and parts of others removed. Cancer is days of sleep, insides on the outside, the Mother Of All Scars and chemo so toxic it numbs your bones.. Remission swamped in anxiety over recurrence rates. But remission all the same. The hair is growing back, the ileostomy bag has finally gone and she is getting stronger, slowly, staggeringly. Lotty, Low Grade Serous Ovarian Cancer (trust her to have the one with the fanciest name). Diagnosed September 2025. No Evidence of Disease since January 2026 🖕 I’ve done a few more Race for Life events since that first one, mostly 5ks, one 10k, a memorable push of a non-all-terrain buggy through a very terrain-y field… and yet that first one still sticks in my head. Those words ‘it hasn’t affected me yet…’ haunt me. But if I could go back, even as just a whisper in her ear, I wouldn’t tell her. Now I am 20 years older, wiser, creakier, stronger but also definitely more likely to need a wee more often. I like walking but generally not 26 miles at a time… and I like my sleep very much. The walk I am doing is overnight, and yes, it’s a marathon, more than eight times longer than that first 5k. It’s going to be really hard. It’s going to hurt. And at times it will probably be a total bitch. But you know what? Cancer is f*cking worse. So I’m doing it anyway. Not for cancer, but for them. The lost. The winners. The fighters. The haunted. And her, the girl with the naive eyes who didn’t know cancer but went for a walk anyway. Because why not.