The beginning or somewhere in between... my story.

Being told you’ve got cancer is one thing, but being told you’re just getting chemo to extend your life and not to eventually cure you, is a whole other ball game, I didn’t know what to say or do when it first came out of the doctors mouth “We can’t operate” but what is anyone supposed to say to that, you think you’re bulletproof after getting through 3 previous major operations 2 bouts of chemo and a 6 week stint of radiation and coming out the other side to be writing what I am right now, then only to realize that 2 days before your one year remission celebrations, the excitements cut short with some more bad news.

I guess I sort of knew, something didn’t feel right, it was just a matter of time before something came back and interrupted my life again, it’s just I was hoping it wouldn’t be so soon, my life had just started to fall into place, I’d finally found a job I was reasonably comfortable with, working in a gym getting an hour a day to workout and keep healthy, I had a girlfriend, she’d do anything for me and got along with her like no other. And I’d started being responsible and independent, living alone, paying bills, out in the real world dad would say.

People find it hard to believe how I can be so positive about it all, I mean, I can’t see why you would be negative about it, either if you have not very long left or it can be fixed, you still need to be positive, not very long left, well have the best fun you possibly can and do everything you’ve ever wanted to do in the time that you have, and if you can be fixed, then grit your teeth and smile and beat this bastard again.

I’d been given the first option and it wasn’t one I was willing to take, I was going to try every damned thing that had a chance of curing my cancer or shrinking it enough to operate on, I was going to grit my teeth and I sure as hell wasn’t going to roll over and die easily by any stretch of the imagination, that wasn’t me, I liked being a fighter, it was good to know that you had such a hard challenge and if you could get on top of it, like I did last year, you felt like the Muhammad Ali of Cancer.

And I did, I felt like I was unstoppable, I wanted to help others, but most importantly, I wanted to find a cure. There’s little government funding in cancer research and so I did all that I could in order to raise money for the Queensland Cancer Fund.

Often people ask me why I don’t do it for canteen or organizations that help people living with cancer, and I guess it’s because I don’t want them to have to deal with it in the first place, if there’s a cure found, then these organizations won’t be packed to the brim with sick and ill kids and elderly. If you can’t tell it’s something I’m quite passionate about I just wish I only had the smarts to be able to do the research myself.

I see cancer as 98 percent attitude and 2 percent disease, I never once laid down to rest and let this thing get on top of me and take control and it wasn’t something that was going to happen in the future either, if you keep a positive attitude day in and day out, you’re killing that bastard don’t you worry about that.

You can go on and ask yourself why it’s happened to you and why not someone who’s done bad things in their life when you’ve done only harmless things, and sure, I’ve done that myself, but really at the end of the day it doesn’t make the cancer go away, so there’s little point in worrying about that. People can go through life raping, murdering, abusing their own bodies all sorts of things, but it’s you that has been dealt the shitty card, so work with what you’ve got.