Kate has run the Great North Run on behalf of Peaches for three years running (sorry, pun intended) and we couldn’t be more grateful. Her story explains why she regularly supports Peaches – thank you Kate.
I have raised money and ran the Great North Run for Peaches for the past three years because of my mam.
Back in 2021 my mam was suffering from symptoms like irregular bleeding, she went to the doctors about it and ended up seeing two different consultants who both decided that there was nothing wrong with her, didn’t really listen and said it was just a polyp that was causing the bleeding.
My mam came home feeling like she had wasted NHS time and like there mustn’t be anything going on with her body.
A year later, she was still getting these symptoms and feeling unwell and really not herself, but didn’t want to go to the doctors after her last experience as she felt it must be ‘normal’. Eventually after being persuaded by my dad, she went back to the doctors, was seen by a consultant straight away, and soon found out that it wasn’t a polyp causing the bleeding it was actually cancer of the endometrium and within two weeks she was having a total hysterectomy with bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy.
Once this was removed they realised it was at stage 2 but very luckily it had contained itself in her womb and hadn’t spread to anywhere else in her body. After recovering from the operation, she received brachytherapy just to make sure all the cancer had gone and hadn’t spread.
When my mam found out it was cancer, the Macmillan nurse gave her a wallet which had a Peaches leaflet in.
She found that she didn’t get much help or information about what she was going through from any of her healthcare specialists, but thankfully for your leaflet she finally found somewhere which had lots of info about what she was going through, help and relief that she wasn’t the only one.
After all of this I knew Peaches was the charity I wanted to raise money for! As my mam would have really struggled without finding out about Peaches and I just think it’s an incredible charity, not only for the woman going through it, but for the family’s that watch their loved ones having to deal with womb cancer!
