Shortly after Margot was diagnosed with blood cancer, Vicki and I realised that we had a communication issue. Bad news travels fast and we had quickly become inundated and overwhelmed with enquiries from people who were all asking the same question: “how’s Margot ?”
So we set up a password protected website and asked people to visit the website for the latest update on how Margot was getting on.
Thereafter, whenever there was something to report, I wrote a new entry. These blog entries included updates on Margot’s treatment & how she was feeling, photographs, videos, medical notes, our thoughts and feelings. In the main, I found recording these updates practically useful and also personally therapeutic, however there were moments when it became a bit of an obligation and a millstone.
Vicki and I shared these website login details with family and friends who had enquired after our daughter. Sharing Margot’s blog helped bring some semblance of order to an otherwise chaotic time of our lives.
Margot was diagnosed with blood cancer on 7 October and every year since we have marked this date as the annual ‘Team Margot Donor Registration Day’, to help spread awareness and to encourage action. As a society, we still need many more blood, organ, stem cell and bone marrow donors; this remains the core focus of the charity.
However, Team Margot Foundation also provides a range of support to families caring for child cancer patients, not least because we know how hard life can be when caring for a sick child.
As part of this support, we felt there was merit in sharing Margot’s blog more widely. So today, on the anniversary of the date when our world was turned upside down, we are making Margot’s blog publicly accessible.
We haven’t attempted to pretty this up or change what’s written in any way. It’s clunky, pretty raw and some of it might well make for extremely dull reading.
However, by sharing this private blog, we hope that other parents and families might find something in Margot’s story that helps them cope a little better, when caring for a child with cancer.
Yaser & Vicki Martini
margotmartini.co.uk
Username: Journal
Password: GoMargot!
(please note: case sensitive)
Husband to Vicki and father to Oscar (2007), Rufus (2008), Digby (2015), Humphrey (2017) & Margot (2012-2014)
Team Margot’s mission
To help save and improve lives by educating, inspiring and motivating people, especially from ethnically diverse communities, to register as blood, organ, stem cell and bone marrow donors and to provide a range of support to families caring for child cancer patients.
Team Margot also provides secretariat support to the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Ethnicity Transplantation and Transfusion.