Anthony Wasson was diagnosed with a blood cancer called leukaemia. The following are all Anthony’s words, shared with the Leukaemia Foundation to help raise awareness of blood cancer during September’s Blood Cancer Awareness Month 2019.

In late 2014, I had been experiencing bad headaches whilst I was overseas for a few months. Then one day I started bleeding from my mouth whilst I was asleep.

After visiting my GP, it was decided that I should undergo a CT and MRI scan to investigate the situation.

Unfortunately this scan came back with abnormalities and was told to go straight to emergency as I had bleeding on the brain.

After some tests I was diagnosed with a form of Leukaemia. I was then admitted and moved to ICU. The following day, the doctor called on to see me to confirm that I had AML [Acute Myeloid Leukaemia].

The next day I had the central line I steered and chemo started the day after.

I then spent 5 months in hospital over Christmas and met year, and was unable to see my three young kids as they were under 18.

My immune system was knocked out by the chemo. After a number of blood and platelet transfusions in hospital and as an outpatient, I started getting infections where I ended up on defence drugs.

Fast forward nearly 4 years, I had a blood test in July and less than 1% blasts and feeling good.

A few things I did learn on this journey is that’s each person is their own so you can’t look at what happened to others, each person accepts the drugs differently and the drugs react to individuals differently.