Great Aunt & Uncle Roy and Daphne

Do you remember much from when you were very young?   I have a memory of being at my great-grandmothers house one day, which isn’t so strange as I was there nearly every day throughout my childhood.  Although I don’t remember specific details I remember it was a different day to normal and I remember a green velvet chair that I was playing with. I was only 3 years old at the time and the image is very clear and vivid so there must have been something very different about this particular day.

It’s only now that I realise that this was the day of my great-aunt’s funeral and my great-grandmother looked after us kids whilst everyone else went to the service.  Apparently I drew all over Nan’s green velvet chair with a blue felt tip…oops!

Great-Aunt Daphne died from ovarian cancer back in 1974.  Even now, ovarian cancer is notoriously late to diagnose as the symptoms can be very vague.  Once diagnosed, the chances are that the disease will progress as it needs to be caught early.  Forty years ago, my Great-Aunt wouldn’t really have stood a chance and she was in her early 40’s, my age now, when she died whilst being operated on to try to remove the cancer.

Daphne left behind my two cousins who were almost in their teens.   But this isn’t the whole the story as nine years earlier, my Great-Uncle Roy had died from lung cancer, leaving his wife Daphne to look after their two young children.  Nine years on and my two cousins had lost both their mother and father.

This is a typical story of cancer in the 1960’s and 1970’s when treatments and therapies were limited.  Treatment has come on in leaps and bounds since then and it’s all because of one thing – research.  Money spent looking at why cancer happens, how it forms, what the early symptoms are and how they can be detected.

Although lung and ovarian cancer are still hard cancers to treat, there are better therapies now than 40 years ago.  Help me to raise money to make them even better.

I’m running the race for life in memory of a number of special people and will have both Roy and Daphne in my heart and thoughts as I run.  Although I never knew them personally, I know the effect that their deaths had on their children, their parents and the rest of the family.

Please sponsor me at: https://www.raceforlifesponsorme.org/onepint/