Michelle’s story (Taken from the Just Giving page.)

Michelle is our dear friend who we met mostly through our love of partying in our younger days. Throughout our years as friends, we have watched our children grow up together and enjoyed many mad holidays together with all our kids in tow!

One thing we love about our Michelle is how she is the life and soul of any get together, and has a natural ability to make people laugh. She will always find the positives of any situation in life (including her battle with cancer) even when there’s lots of negatives! After taking herself off to University she earned herself a degree in mental health nursing, and led her to practice in the field of mental health, which totally suited her personality as someone who always wants to give/help. She later married the love of her life Carl, and together they have 4 amazing daughters, Lily (21), Amber (11), Ayrah (8) and little Erin (3).

Michelle was first diagnosed with melanoma 10 years ago. Then after 5 years of being in remission, sadly the cancer returned 2.5 years ago, which was found accidentally and was at stage 4. This time, and we say this with heavy hearts, there is no cure as the melanoma is incurable.

Anyone who knows Michelle, will know how determined she is, and how hard she has tried to (and continues to) fight this disease, especially for her children and Carl. She has fought a brave battle, showing such courage, strength of character and as always, embraced her situation with grace and positivity. However, as with any terminal illness her time is now limited and treatment has been stopped due to progression of the disease in the brain.

Michelle along with Carl, have a few things they would like to do over the coming weeks/months while she is still well enough to do them: They would love a family holiday together, rent a camper-van and a narrow-boat so they can spend time together as a family doing fun things, and making long lasting memories for the children.

We would like to raise enough money to help them achieve this and with anything left over, going towards everyday living costs. Michelle had to give up work some time ago when she became ill. More recently Carl had to reduce his hours at work to become a full time dad to his girls and support and care for Michelle. Frustratingly, following her first diagnosis, Michelle tried to take out life insurance to safeguard for her future, but after a long process, this was declined. The rent still needs to be paid and bills don’t stop coming. And as you know with children, there’s always something they need. You can only imagine the challenges that all this brings!

We appreciate your generosity and support to help us and hope we can achieve our target (and more). Thank you, from Dawn, Sam, Sarah and Jane and more importantly, a big thank you to Michelle and Carl for agreeing for us to set this up.

Thanks Dawn for letting me use this.