![\"Leukaemia,](\"http:\/\/wordpress.satellite.mmu.ac.uk\/northernquota-old\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/437\/2020\/05\/ellis_1.jpg\")
\u201cIt started in December 2018. I\u2019d had a few doctors appointments but nothing had come up that was anything serious at the time. I then went for a chest x-ray at St Luke\u2019s Hospital in Bradford and that came back all clear,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was sort of happy with how I was. I thought \u2018<\/em><\/strong>there can\u2019t be anything wrong\u2019.<\/p>\n \u201cThen a couple of weeks later, things got worse again. Mum and dad were noticing that I wasn\u2019t myself and saying that I should get checked out. I ended up going with my old man to the doctors.<\/p>\n \u201cFor days on end I was thinking about what was going to happen and what the next step would be. It got to Christmas Eve and we had an appointment at Bradford Royal Infirmary.<\/p>\n \u201cWe sat down with five or six nurses in the room and they did a few checks. I had three injections in my neck where the lump was and they said they were 99% sure this type of leukaemia was what it was, but it\u2019d take a week or so to get properly looked at in the lab.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was having to tell my friends and family that was the hardest bit. I was 20 years old at the time and I had a form of blood cancer but I was determined to not let it define anything or take over my life.<\/p>\n \u201cI wanted to carry on as normal and that was the main aim right from getting diagnosed.<\/p>\n \u201cAt first I was obviously really scared but after a couple of days it was strange,I became motivated to get on and fight it rather than sit back and let it come towards me.<\/p>\n \u201cI wanted to take it to it and see what it had.<\/p>\n \u201cEveryone around me made it a lot easier to cope with. The club offered me to have time off and still be paid, but I just wanted to carry on life as normal.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019d have chemo on a Tuesday, which is quite brutal and it\u2019d take it out of me for hours. It was four different drugs coming into my body and ripping away at parts of me, just to repair other parts.<\/p>\n \u201cThen I\u2019d have the day off on a Wednesday and go back to work on a Thursday, as if nothing had happened.<\/p>\n \u201cThe players, the staff and just everyone at the club were unbelievable. Sean Dyche would regularly ask me to come in his office just for a general check up on how I was and to ask about what was going on.<\/p>\n \u201cThen you had the players like Tom Heaton, James Tarkowski and Jack Cork that were asking all the time how I was, how my last round of treatment was and so on. It\u2019s just a really good club. They were really good with me and I\u2019m forever grateful for that.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was 12 rounds of chemo all together, every two weeks for six months.<\/p>\n \u201cObviously you start losing your hair and bits of your eyebrows and you start thinning, there\u2019s loads of little parts like that. I actually didn\u2019t lose all my hair and managed to keep quite a bit, so I was lucky in a way.<\/p>\n \u201cAt a charity event, in May 2019, we raised \u00a330,000 for the ward that I was treated on, with an auction of football shirts, vouchers and all that type of thing. It was held at Malmaison Hotel in Leeds and was a really good night.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a really proud moment for me to raise that amount of money for such a special place.<\/p>\n \u201cI made some good friends on the ward and there\u2019s some people that I\u2019ll never forget. I still go back to this day.<\/p>\n \u201cI eventually finished treatment in July 2019 and then it was September when I got the all clear.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was just a meeting with the same doctor I\u2019d been having meetings with every week to see how I was. They walked in the office, sat down and said \u2018do you want the good news or the bad news?\u2019<\/p>\n \u201cThey said the good news was that it had all gone but the bad news was that they wouldn\u2019t be seeing me for much longer.<\/p>\n \u201cI think they did get along with me quite well so in a way they could have a bit of a joke about it.<\/p>\n They were a great set of staff and the NHS are unbelievable with what they do<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n \u201cIt\u2019s been nearly 12 months now since I finished treatment and a year on, I\u2019ve never felt as strong and fit in my life.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m back working full-time and working out in my spare time. I run, walk or cycle at least once a day and so I\u2019m keeping really active.<\/p>\n \u201cWork\u2019s going really well and health-wise, I\u2019m all fit and well now.<\/p>\n \u201cLast year was the craziest year of my life. The highs and lows are indescribable. Although it was one of the scariest and most daunting years of my life, it\u2019s one of the best as well.<\/p>\n \u201cSome of the stuff I did just made it a year to remember for both good reasons as well as the bad. It wasn\u2019t just a year from hell.<\/p>\n \u201cI had a lot of good, good people around me, who were unbelievable from day dot, and I just wanted to make the whole experience as positive as I could.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As a person in any walk of life, there is a set of three words you never want to be on the receiving end of:…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1216,"featured_media":4478,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4972,1],"tags":[1901,217,3837],"class_list":["post-4481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-uncategorised","tag-bradford","tag-burnley-fc","tag-leukeamia"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n![\"Leukaemia,](\"http:\/\/wordpress.satellite.mmu.ac.uk\/northernquota-old\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/437\/2020\/05\/ellis_3.jpg\")
\n