How the story began

Twelve years ago my daughter was diagnosed with Leukaemia, she was eight years old. After trying to explain to her about the disease, and how it was treated, the first thing that she said was “I want to meet someone with the same thing as me.” At that particular time there wasn’t another child in Bristol Children’s Hospital with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia. The next thing that she wanted was to read a story about a child that had leukaemia. There was very little around apart from the colouring book about the Hickman line, “The Wiggly” book. The book was informative and child friendly but not really about “someone.”

We spent the long summer inside the four walls of a hospital ward acting out many fantasy stories. Most of the time we used favourite soft animals, Barbie dolls and numerous plastic figures, with some attempt on my part to sew clothes for the dolls and animals.

Time went on and horses became much more a focus of our lives, so although I wanted to write a story for children with leukaemia, it went onto a back burner while I thought of different kinds of stories for a daughter who was fit and healthy and trying to adjust to being back to the world of school.

Little ideas for a story continued to flit around in my head until the son of a friend was diagnosed with ALL just over a year ago. There was a terrible irony in this, as the friend had been very supportive in the fundraising we had done for CLIC when my daughter was going through treatment. The impetus was there to write something, something that was more than just an explanation of what it’s like to have leukaemia, but something that would also give a sick child the chance to read a story with a positive self image for themselves as the hero of a story. And so, I began to write…