Tessa's Race for Life

On the 1st October 2017 I’ll be taking part in my first ever sponsered event to raise money for Cancer research. Then a few days after I’ll be having a 10 hour surgery to get my new girls (boobs) in the last part of this journey. In 2015 I was diagnosed with breast cancer and I kicked its arse! Breast cancer robbed me of many things, but it didn’t take my fight, determination, positivity and spirit. After many years of multiple failed, heart breaking and painful IVF’s I finally fell pregnant using our last remaining frozen embryo. At 13 weeks we had our scan, ready to tell the world, the happinest news we could ever wish for. And a few days later I found a lump in my breast, thinking it was just part and parcel of normal changes a woman goes through while pregnant, off I went to my doctor for a check up. A few days later we was invited in to receive the polar opposite news of what we expected. While we was looking at cots one minute and bouncing off the wall as happy as can be. Then next our world was thrown up into the air and came crashing down like train had hit us, I felt like someone had knocked the life out of me. Cancer doesn’t discriminate, it doesn’t care if your pregnant, how old you are or who you are. Our fight began and thats exactly what it was, a fight. And we was determined to win, we was going to have our baby and I was going to be here to raise her. I was not going to let this rob me of my long awaited pregnancy, so while I endured almost 20 chemotherapy appointments, a mastectomy, and all the side effects and time consuming hospital appointments and sleepless harrowing nights that went with it, we also fought hard and had the most most amazing support ever from our lovely family and truly loyal friends and a wonderful community. We will never forget how much we leaned on them all and they will never understand how much they helped us both. On the 23rd December Isabella Grace was born at 31 weeks, she came out screaming and punching the air, she was defiantly our girl. And while she took on her own fight for the next 9 weeks in a premature unit, I carried on with active treatment including radiotherapy and targeted hormone treatment. In 2016 I started to hit my wall. We eventually took Isabella home and started to find our new normal, whatever that was to be. 2017 has been a great year, life is beginning to settle and with two clear scans behind me, I am defining where cancer is. It walks along side me, on my terms. Although I still have scans every 6 months and live with some pretty hard side effects, life gets easier and staying strong and positive is paramount. None of this would have been possible without money raised to help research into new drugs that we desperately need. The cancer I was diagnosed with was hormone receptive, an amazing drug called Herceptin was given to me every three weeks for one year after to prevent the cancer coming back. Money raised will enable us to keep kicking arse and for more people to keep sharing their survivorship stories. Please dig deep and donate what you can. Much love Tessa xx