Let me tell you a little story about fate....
When I was 5 years old I suffered from a rare type of leukaemia, one that 18 years later sparked the event that made me believe in fate...
​
This event all started when I was trying to set my footprint in the writing industry. It didn't take long for reality to hit and let me know that to become a full time paid writer I would need at least 5+ years of experience. 5 YEARS! Like many others who had recently left uni, finding full time employment seemed like mission impossible (runs to Spotify to play the MI theme song that has been stuck in my head since typing that last sentence).
After a couple of months of job searching I found employment at HMV in Oxford Street. WHile I didn't mind going back into retail, I never saw it as a permanent role for the future. Since I had mornings off I thought I'd find an unpaid writing role so I had something to contribute to that experience that was needed.
Here comes the interesting part.
I started writing for a website that was aimed towards young adults and wrote all kinds of articles from film reviews and sporting events, to attending exhibitions and going to gigs. It seemed pretty perfect. There I met a girl called Lara whose smiling face and outlook on life was something I found was contagious.
We were lucky enough to get tickets to the London 2012 opening ceremony, which in itself was such a surreal experience. Me and Lara were standing in the cue to get drinks and she noticed the tattoo running along the inside of my left arm which reads 'survivor' written in an orange ribbon (the sign for childhood leukaemia).
Lara went on to say that her father works as a scientist for the Royal Marsden Hospital, which happens to be the hospital I was treated at. Weird right? Well this story gets a whole lot better...
A few weeks later we were paired to work on another project together and at the bottom of an email Lara asked if she had mentioned that she told her dad about me. She then went on to tell me something that has stayed with me ever since.
She noted that her dad recognised my surname (it's Rathbone, not the most common name as you can guess) and the day later he went into working looking for my old medical notes. To my surprise he found them (ever since going for checkups from an early age I was always informed that my notes had been 'lost'), and once he had a look through them I was amazed to hear what he discovered.
In the email Lara said that the type of leukaemia I had was very rare and the doctors didn't think the usual medicine used to treat childhood leukaemia would be affective. There was a method/type of treatment that had been created, however they were yet to use it as a way of treating cancer. The doctors believed that this could work to treat me, however because it was a new method it needed the approval of the head of the scientist team that had created it.
That person in charge would be....*pauses for dramatic effect*...Lara's dad!
It was Lara's dad who held the decision on whether to use this treatment on me. Incredible. 17 years later from having cancer I meet the daughter of the man who saved my life. My word I love fate.
