Its been a month since we celebrated the launch of our partnership with the East of England Cancer Alliance and now we are excitedly anticipating the arrival of new stock at the end of the week.
The launch day itself was an amazing opportunity to realise just how far we have come, the achievements finally felt real and our beaming smiles as we interviewed for ITV Anglia and BBC radio Cambridge are testament to how hard we have worked over the last year and a bit to bring the flash cards to life, its not always been easy, but its most definitely been worth it, and what better way to celebrate than with a family funday that incorporated the 73rd Birthday celebrations of the NHS. The wonderful Maggies centre at Addenbrooks in Cambridge provided the perfect setting for a fun filled day with art therapy sessions, a very special therapy dog, pizza, and cake, we couldn't have asked for more.
We often get asked who we enlisted to help us create the cards, how did we determine what the wording should be, who decided what each letter should stand for, how we would illustrate the various aspects of treatment, but up until very recently when we used focus groups to discuss improvements we wanted to make going forward, it was just the two of us, Jen with her doodles, Nic with her words, sitting through endless amounts of zoom meetings (which thanks to the incredible friendship we have developed, were never a chore) and passing most of our decisions through our incredibly important panel, Eliza, Albie, Dylan and Poppy, who are the rhyme and reason behind it all.
We are driven by our own experiences, the distinct lack of relatable resources available to us at diagnosis, the desperation we felt every time we considered how our illness would affect our precious small people, knowing that our treatment pathways would impact on their lives, we needed to find a way to minimise that. We knew that being honest was the right way forward for us but we just couldn't find anything that reflected our positive outlook, nothing felt right. Combining our professional skills as a teacher and a nurse came naturally and we are so proud of what we were able to create.
The dream has always been to make the flash cards as accessible as possible to all who can benefit from their use and we are both so very grateful to the East of England Cancer Alliance for working with us to achieve that dream.