This month you could be forgiven for thinking there’s a lot of awareness being raised by all sorts of causes. It’s Breast Cancer Awareness month, National Infertility Awareness week, National Adoption week, World Mental Health day and many more of, you know, those small life topics we deal with.
The thing is, when you’ve been through something that impacts your life in every way, you already have so much awareness of the issue that you almost don’t want any more – you practically can’t take any more.
But, aside from aiming to, and hopefully achieving the goal of, increasing funds for important causes (which brings about much debate in itself), awareness campaigns are arguably important because they help us get the message out there about what an individual, maybe someone we know, has been through. It helps bystanders understand a story better and maybe eventually lead to changing perceptions and even more support.
Perhaps the way awareness is raised is a little controversial at times or feels inappropriate, but I can only hope it all comes down to the same message – we want people to understand more about the issue.
Macmillan Blog
As it happens, I wrote a blog for Macmillan Cancer Support on just some of the awareness days that mean something to me. You can read it here. It’s not very pretty but that’s real life sometimes and hopefully it says something about the experience of coming through challenges, little by little, day by day.
Live chat
If you want to find practical ways to manage your emotions in your own fertility experiences, take a look at the live video my friend Naomi from Embrace Fertility and I did last week here. We laughed, we cried, we showed you don’t have to be perfect and ready made to tell your own story or even support others in theirs.
I also spoke about cancer and fertility with the lovely Natalie from Fertility Podcast, and you can listen to the newly-released episode right now.
Moving Forward Webinar
It’s no surprise that cancer and fertility are huge topics. It feels like going through one huge life changing experience might be enough, and it might be all we can handle. But living with the consequences of cancer treatment, both mentally and physically, is something the cancer community talk more openly about as being a surprise and, in itself, life changing.
That’s why the next Moving Forward Webinar is on Cancer and Fertility. We’ve got the amazing Kathryn Nattress joining us because she’s epic and her PhD thesis is on this very topic. She also talks so eloquently about the emotional impact of dealing with both. Join us on 2nd November by signing up here.
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