K is 18 years old now but a week after her 15th birthday she was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia. K went through a horrendously traumatic time. It was devastating to see her struggle through her treatment, that involved various chemotherapies and she experienced several serious side effects that went along with it. She spent many weeks/months of her life in hospital.
Her social and school life stopped for at least 18 months. She isolated herself for most of that time as she needed protected from the various infections that she could have easily caught by seeing people or leaving the house. A very similar scenario to what she is experiencing now but this time experiencing it with the global community.
Every single day of K’s illness, I found myself reflecting, analysing and vocalising the experiences subconsciously to myself. I also felt the need to read about how others coped . K also has Down Syndrome. Her condition made list to data her experiences different sometimes. She couldn’t have one of the drugs that they gave to the other children and her threshold for being admitted into hospital was lower. I contacted the Down Syndrome Association asking if they knew a family who had been through what we were going through. A Mum kindly contacted me, she had gone through it with her son over 10 years ago. Her’s was a positive story and I appreciated her getting in touch with me. I needed to hear another family’s story.
As we reached the end of K’s treatment phase and she went into remission, my thoughts in writing. I needed to go through it all in my head and somehow make sense of it. I decided to take the advice of family and friends who asked me to write 3 years before. I told myself it didn’t matter if no one reads the book. However if just one family can find something useful from it that would be great. Hopefully one day my book will be there for my daughters to read, if they ever needed to look back at ‘those years’. Writing the book was a way of me consolidating those 3 years and boxing it up.