Kirsty's Last Chapters: Cancer Be Damned

Plant your roots down deeper,

You’re someone’s favourite place to sit,

Come wind or rain or hail,

Darling, do not quit.

There are a whole array of brilliant reasons to set up a go fund me campaign, this one? It’s bittersweet. It’s not one we want to be making for someone we adore, but we are doing, because we adore her.

Our dear friend Kirsty is dealing with cancer. There isn’t a good kind of cancer but there’s also the really not good kind, or as she put it “the worst theme park ever.”

In March 2022, at just 36 years of age, Kirsty was diagnosed with grade 3, stage three (locally advanced) Triple Negative Breast Cancer. After chemotherapy and two surgeries, she had hoped she was through the worst of it, but tragically, the cancer returned and is now spreading to various points throughout her body, including the lungs, the muscles around her shoulder, pelvis, lower spine and breastbone.

Without treatment, Kirsty has been told she would have c. 6 months to live. As such, she's currently undergoing a new chemo combo, which gives her a 12% chance of being around by 2027, probably less given the number of secondary tumour sites.

Our Kirsty has a way about her, a way we want to see for many, many, many decades. Centuries, even. She’s a history buff, who better to be an ancient vampire, right? But the reality of this shitty theme park is that she’s stuck, standing in line to a ride she doesn’t want to go on, and there’s not an awful lot we can do about it.

So? We wait with her, we ride that ride with her.

We’ve set up this fund in the hopes that Kirsty, her lovely husband and family can do something cool and worry less about finance whilst they’re stuck. It’s been set up with Kirsty’s consent, bashfully agreed to, I might add.

Whatever the queue is like, whatever the ride is like, we want to make it count.

You can check out Kirsty’s blog here. https://making-it-count.co.uk

When I spoke to Kirsty about the blog, she told me that she writes not only because it's cathartic, but also because she wants to try and encourage younger women to understand that this can still happen to them and that when it does, it can be more aggressive.

"My type of cancer primarily attacks women under 40 and is disproportionately high amongst women of a Black African /Afro Caribbean heritage. It might not just be a cyst, or a hormonal blip; keep your eyes open, explore with your hands so you know your baseline for periodic checking, and don't let any GP fob you off without a second opinion at the Breast clinic."

A lot of us are wondering what we can do to help, we want to band together and do something where our options are limited, so, here we are.

When your back is against the wall, you don’t close your eyes, you roll up your sleeves - Kirsty, a master of words, wine and being badass, 2023.