Thanks for taking the time to visit my JustGiving page.

How to get involved with #positivepants

Take a photo of yourself, wearing, waving, displaying, shaking, jiggling, hanging your most positive pants.
Text EHEC88 £3 to 70070 to make a £3 donation

Post on Facebook, Twitter and/or Instagram your photo, with this message: Here is me in my #positivepants in support of EHE Research. www.ehercc.org.uk
Tag/nominate 5 friends and also state them in your post!!! 

Have fun and thank you! 

My story 

In March 2014 I was on ‘cloud nine’ as I had just given birth to our first child, Owen. Sadly, a post-Caesarian infection resulted in me having to go back into hospital. Lots of tests followed, and during these, it was discovered that I had lesions on my liver which needed further scans. I did not know it at the time, but this was the start of a devastatingly scary few months, at the end of which, I was informed I had a rare cancer called Epithelioid Haemangioendothelioma, or EHE.

EHE is one of the rarest cancers in the world. It typically presents with multiple tumours at the same time. It has both an indolent (passive) and an aggressive form. Sadly, the indolent form will frequently become aggressive. EHE targets women more than men, on a ratio of approximately 4:1. It can present at any age but mostly appears in children, teenagers and young adults where it is often at its most aggressive. There is also a strong clinical signal that the onset of EHE may be connected to puberty in girls and pregnancy in young women, a characteristic of this disease which I think is particularly distressing.

Today, the oncology community have no effective treatments for this cancer, nor can they provide any form of reliable prognosis. And being so rare means that governments, the pharmaceutical industry, and even the big cancer charities, do not provide funding for EHE-specific research. That is why my family and friends are raising the funds needed to help carry forward the critical research required to this cancer and provide answers to the many questions that exist for EHE.

The fact that doctors cannot tell me today how my cancer may develop makes my EHE diagnosis even more frightening. I hope however that the research we are supporting, together with other EHE patients in the UK and around the world, may start to provide the answers we need to be able to beat this cancer. If you want to support rare cancer research, and at the same time support me and my family, then you can do that by making a simple donation here. All funds will go to the EHE Rare Cancer Charity UK.

Thank you for taking the time to find and read this page. And if you do make a donation, then a huge thank you for that too.

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