Thank you to everyone who submitted their Personal Challenge to me, I have been amazed at the response. Many are not published as their authors preferred anonymity, but I would like everyone to know that they were all read, some of them over and over.
It is amazing what we can do, what we can tolerate and how the instinct to survive is so overwhelming when everything is screaming within us to stop, to let go, to give up. All of the stories I received were truly inspirational - thank you.
And so to the winner - Teresa Hamilton for her story Scream Silently. When I received it I remember updating my Blog that day and saying how Teresa's story had made me stop and think. I hope it gives my readers the inspiration that it gave me, thank you Theresa - what a girl.
Teresa's story can be found below. If anyone would like to get in touch with any of the authors of the stories below then please email your details and I will pass them on.
Personal Challenges Competition
This Challenge is my Challenge of a Lifetime. I hope that it will be an inspiration for all of the women out there who deal with Challenges every day of their lives.
It is amazing what we can do, what we can tolerate and how the instinct to survive is so overwhelming when everything is screaming within us to stop, to let go, to give up. All of the stories I received were truly inspirational - thank you.
And so to the winner - Teresa Hamilton for her story Scream Silently. When I received it I remember updating my Blog that day and saying how Teresa's story had made me stop and think. I hope it gives my readers the inspiration that it gave me, thank you Theresa - what a girl.
Teresa's story can be found below. If anyone would like to get in touch with any of the authors of the stories below then please email your details and I will pass them on.
Personal Challenges Competition
This Challenge is my Challenge of a Lifetime. I hope that it will be an inspiration for all of the women out there who deal with Challenges every day of their lives.
Working with Macmillan has certainly shown that there are so many people out there facing Challenges of a Lifetime – the trek to Everest Base Camp, I hope, will go some way to helping these people.
I have been thinking about how to spread the word about the Challenges we face every day. I have decided to start a competition – an opportunity for all of the amazing people out there to tell us about the Challenges they have faced in the World, so that we can share them and inspire other women.
I recently had an email from Anne Watts, the author of Always the Children. She is attending a launch at the end of November for the book “If Chloe Can,” an inspirational careers book which is to be launched and distributed for free across Merseyside, aimed at 11-13 year olds and then extended nationwide. On Merseyside, girls are double the national average to claim benefits and half the national average to set up in business.
The book is comprised of a wide variety of female ‘firsts’ who have all been high achievers in their respective fields. All of whom, have overcome difficulties and hardships to become the best in the world. Their talents and expertise range from science to finance, law to politics, fashion and arts. In total, 50 world class women have taken part in the book
The aim of the book is that it will be read by children, who would not otherwise be easily reached by conventional careers advice.
The intention is to raise the aspiration of young girls and encourage them to take an active and constructive attitude towards their own personal development. In essence, it is about giving girls positive and varied female role models who are successful in a broad range of professional areas.
I don’t know about you, but I was instantly drawn to this – what an amazing idea, giving these girls an enormous insight into what they can achieve with their lives. The women that have contributed to this book will, I am sure, make a difference to some of these girls’ lives, their futures.
And so this is where I come in. I may not be the brightest, fastest or best at anything – but believe me, if I can do this then anyone can.
The wonderful people at Hush, www.hush-uk.com, have offered to sponsor our Challenge Competition and are offering an amazing prize to the most inspirational Challenge story. I don’t know if you are aware of the Hush brand, but believe me you need it in your life. Beautiful loungewear that I adore and I will be coveting on my Christmas list.
And so to the Competition.
If you would like to win this beautiful big sloppy jumper gift set, comprising a jumper, stretch tee, and leggings all wrapped together in a beautiful Hush Gift Box it couldn't be simpler.
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| Big Sloppy Jumper Gift Set |
Please submit your “Challenge of a Lifetime” stories to me, Hayley at hayley.everestbasecamp@gmail.com, with Challenge of a Lifetime in the subject header. There is no set length for your story, but please add your personal details so that we can contact you should you win the prize.
Please also indicate whether you are happy for me to publish your Story on the Blog, your personal details will not be used.
The Closing Date for entries is Saturday 1st January 2011. Good luck, and together lets inspire other women out there. x
<a href="http://www.theprizefinder.com" title="ThePrizeFinder.com - home of competitions and prize winning" target="_blank">ThePrizeFinder - UK Competitions</a>.
<a href="http://www.theprizefinder.com" title="ThePrizeFinder.com - home of competitions and prize winning" target="_blank">ThePrizeFinder - UK Competitions</a>.
Scream Silently – Challenge of a Lifetime.
By Teresa Hamilton
‘You have no choice, Mrs Hamilton, if you don’t have this surgery, you will die.’ I will never forget the consultant’s words.
It didn't happen overnight. I became aware that a mole on my leg had changed over a couple of months. It had always been there; but it wasn't that big, nor irritated, so I didn't think anything of it. It was still a small map of the Isle of Man; it was just that the mountain range had grown up at the south end. I couldn't believe that it could be anything lethal. I couldn’t believe my body would let me down by harbouring anything nasty.
It’s amazing how your mind focuses when you’re given a diagnosis like this. My youngest son was barely eighteen months old – he would have no memory of me if I died. My middle daughter had just started Nursery; she suffered from Anoxic Seizures – who would be there to comfort her whilst her body contorted in its uncontrollable grip? My eldest, a girl of eleven, was about to change schools - taking that huge step from primary to secondary education. Her grandmother was also battling breast cancer, how would this extra family trauma affect her? I would clutch at any straw if it meant that I’d be around to watch my children grow up.
After having the mole removed, the results came back confirming it was a malignant melanoma. My family and I gave a huge sigh of relief that we had been diligent and caught it in time. Or so we believed.
Showering one spring morning, six months later, I discovered a lump in my groin. I had it biopsied. The phone rang the next afternoon with the results. The toddler was having a tantrum. I couldn’t hear the voice on the other end of the phone, so locked myself in the only peaceful place nearby - the downstairs toilet. Gripping the receiver to my ear whilst sitting on the closed lid, I heard the news I had not dare to believe. Cancer. My mind leapt from having it in one lymph node, to my whole body being riddled with it. Nothing prepared me for the sheer panic that gripped me when I was labelled with that terrifying six-letter word.
The subsequent surgery swiftly ensued. A resulting 12-inch cut down my groin, thigh and a partially numb leg seemed nothing to retaining my life. Even the following dose of MRSA only slightly shook my resolve. It was the sight of my mother’s grey face and soft, downy cobnut head, whilst recovering from her treatment that reduced me to tears when she struggled to visit.
Two days after surgery the oncologist sitting at the end of my bed offered me the chance to take part in a medical drug trial for a skin cancer vaccine. In my fragile state, his next comment again bought tears to my eyes. ‘Of course, we have to take you off the programme if the cancer returns.’ This man, calmly staring at me, was dangling a carrot, but could whip it away before I’d had a chance to bite. I resented him rationally reminding me that my nightmare wasn’t over.
On my forty-first birthday I received the results of the remaining lymph nodes they had removed. Only the one node that we’d already discovered was cancerous.
I joined the drug trial. Over the next five years I got used to waiting an hour at my monthly visits to be seen. The faces became familiar. I hoped each time than none were missing. Sometimes my notes weren’t there. Sometimes I was left off the lists and I had to wait while my vaccine was defrosted. Sometimes I had to route-march the length of the hospital, visiting several different departments for tests. Even the injections, which caused my groin and armpits to ooze constantly for the first ten weeks, did not put me off. I learnt to grit my teeth and send my mind somewhere good for those painful moments. In time my eight unsightly, red weal marks under my arms gradually started to fade enough to be on show again.
It is now ten years down the road. Thankfully I am still here to see this year’s roses bloom but I have joined the Bereavement Club. Tragically, my beloved mother didn’t make it. My comforter who knew the demons I faced lost her battle with life not long after her diagnosis. In those first, five years of my illness I also lost my eldest sister to cancer and my best friend since gymslip days, was wiped off the face of this earth in the Asian Tsunami. So much grief, at times, so overwhelming.
The death of my three angels reminds me daily that I am lucky. Although I have to wear a full length, support stocking on my leg to prevent lymphoedema and the whole of the top of my left thigh is numb, I am still alive. No moaning for me about growing old. Each birthday is a bonus. I intend to sing from the rooftops if I make it past my three score years and ten. My son is now a wonderful teenager, my two daughters more beautiful than I deserve. The journey to get here may have been darker at times than I thought I could bear, but this is one woman who is not going to meet her maker without a fight.
A Cut for Life – by Wendy Reakes
I can remember vividly the day it all ended, that life of mine; career girl, vivacious and independent, the girl about town, a woman on the up. But now as I pen these words, and after they have cut through the very flesh and the very bones of me, it’s difficult to recall when exactly it all began.
Talking about the past, that terrible time, makes me tremble at the revelations I divulge. They are private thoughts about the people I love, the people who kept me alive and sane. The people who nurtured my wounds and embraced me, without fear of rebuttal; abandoning their own desires to cater to mine, to make me feel protected and confident about the life I was about to face.
I remember one. Doctor Ruth I called her. She was a dark haired angel leaning over my body, her smile sympathetic and her face showing no fear. Her hand touched mine when she told me something which somehow I always knew. “We’re going to have to amputate,” she said, clear and precise. Her firmness calmed me; her resolve allowing no room for doubt and that ‘to cut’ was the only route left for me now.
I looked at the man standing next to her, his presence and strength towering over me, his gentleness warming me, his love dispelling my fear. “What will we do?” I asked him; only wanting his assurance; just a guiding word. And as I surely knew I couldn’t think beyond that moment, unable to plan as I always planned in times of trouble, he spoke to me.
“It’s a blessing,” he answered, and for once I couldn’t tell what he meant. “Because after, there will be no more pain.”
He was right. It was true. That pain! That excruciating pain gangrene brings, indescribable and terrifying. Pain only momentarily numbed by the morphine pumping through my veins, making me sleep, living in oblivion even though the darkness reigned there, in my unconsciousness.
I recall one dream. It was all black, like a charcoal sketch with deep long strokes, depicting a motorway’s slip-road running down to a raging river where whales and dolphins swam. As I pushed my four flailing limbs, swimming for my life, I looked up and watched an enormous black whale make a towering lunge above me, crashing down on me, snuffing out the light of my darkest thoughts.
They took my leg then, Doctor Ruth and the others. Saving my life with their surgical procedure, as those whales and dolphins led the way, those gentle mammals taking me to a place where I would be safe again, free of that torturous pain.
I was wrong. That wasn’t the end. Gangrene spreads. They never told me, but they knew there was more to come. They could smell it, the disease down there, where the empty space on my bed mocked me; the place which once was full, with a limb long and shapely.
So, they took some more, and after, some more again. My family and friends were praying they would stop. They couldn’t bear any more. Enough! They cried. This shouldn’t be happening. Not to her!
Many could never understand how for me the recovery was worse than the event itself. How my mind played games with me, how the people I thought I knew, changed.
The final scene was misery unleashed. My eternal optimism diminished each day as a knock on the door pushed me further away. I was an entity, no longer the girl I was, someone to pity, to indulge, to tolerate. It killed me, that attitude. It put me in a place where for years I had defended myself against, my armour and high heels preventing them from hurting me. I was stripped bare and they came in droves to torment me; teasing my mind, my soul, my conscience, my passion, and my gusto.
‘Going home’ was arriving at a house, a strange place where suddenly it was mine no more. Ramps, wheelchairs, levers, low levels and canes, all there to assist me, to take away what was left of the person I once was.
Time passed; good happened.
Everything in my world once familiar changed. I married a wonderful man, the love of my life. I bore twins, a beautiful boy and a beautiful girl. Then, leaving our homeland we found a new life in France; a vineyard, a country house, a peaceful existence in an age reminiscent of the fifties, where values and ideals gushed like water in an eternal running stream.
Now, a decade later, as if a new life wasn’t enough to enrich me, to make me smile, to make me dance for joy whilst balanced on two sticks, I now have a shiny silver laptop, enabling me, as the ultimate finalé, to write and to write and to write.
And now I’m home.
Northern China – by Lydia Manch
The first shipment of books that my friend ordered arrived at Ye He Ancient Castle, Jilin Province, with a small handwritten note from Amazon headquarters attached. ‘Furthest I’ve ever had to send a package’, it read. ‘What a strange place you live in…’
I was newly arrived in Northern China, and it already seemed stranger to me than the anonymous note-writer at Amazon could have guessed. Ye He doesn’t make it into many guidebooks, and tourism tends to skip over the area, heading straight from Beijing to cosmopolitan Harbin in the north, without touching down in Jilin Province. In Ye He’s closest town, Siping City, foreigners of any kind are rare enough that the challenge of finding trainers for my size six feet amused and amazed the shop assistants. A small, motherly woman finally took pity on me and led me to the department for men’s shoes instead, solemnly prodding my foot and announcing, ‘Feifei’, by way of explanation. Feifei, meaning ‘baboon’ in Mandarin....
So international tourism to the region is low. Almost every foreign face and pair of baboon-feet that come to the area are headed for the same destination, and like me make their way northwards from Beijing to Changchun, from there to Siping City, and on to the hilltop perch of Northern China Martial Arts Academy, at Ye He Ancient Castle.
The castle was an impressive silhouette when I arrived in the pre-dawn; spiky fortress walls, towering iron gates, stone lions flanking the entrance. It could hardly be more ancient. And the perfect condition of the castle, centuries after it was built, just went to show that the ancient Chinese builders really had wisdom well beyond our modern technology. I mentioned this to Dave, the student in charge of giving me the grand tour. He laughed so hard that he wept a little, and then took me to the base of the fortress walls to show me the concrete reinforcements and polymer-mix blocks of Ye He 1960s-Reconstruction-of-an-Ancient-Castle. In the cellars of the castle Vegas-style neon tubes light up the frescoes of feudal China, and in the watchtowers costumes and plastic spears are stored so that local children on school trips can dress up as warrior hordes and pose for photos in front of the iron gates.
I was newly arrived in Northern China, and it already seemed stranger to me than the anonymous note-writer at Amazon could have guessed. Ye He doesn’t make it into many guidebooks, and tourism tends to skip over the area, heading straight from Beijing to cosmopolitan Harbin in the north, without touching down in Jilin Province. In Ye He’s closest town, Siping City, foreigners of any kind are rare enough that the challenge of finding trainers for my size six feet amused and amazed the shop assistants. A small, motherly woman finally took pity on me and led me to the department for men’s shoes instead, solemnly prodding my foot and announcing, ‘Feifei’, by way of explanation. Feifei, meaning ‘baboon’ in Mandarin....
So international tourism to the region is low. Almost every foreign face and pair of baboon-feet that come to the area are headed for the same destination, and like me make their way northwards from Beijing to Changchun, from there to Siping City, and on to the hilltop perch of Northern China Martial Arts Academy, at Ye He Ancient Castle.
The castle was an impressive silhouette when I arrived in the pre-dawn; spiky fortress walls, towering iron gates, stone lions flanking the entrance. It could hardly be more ancient. And the perfect condition of the castle, centuries after it was built, just went to show that the ancient Chinese builders really had wisdom well beyond our modern technology. I mentioned this to Dave, the student in charge of giving me the grand tour. He laughed so hard that he wept a little, and then took me to the base of the fortress walls to show me the concrete reinforcements and polymer-mix blocks of Ye He 1960s-Reconstruction-of-an-Ancient-Castle. In the cellars of the castle Vegas-style neon tubes light up the frescoes of feudal China, and in the watchtowers costumes and plastic spears are stored so that local children on school trips can dress up as warrior hordes and pose for photos in front of the iron gates.
It was a million miles away from my elaborate visions of crouching and tigering around the ‘Ancient Castle and Serene Lake’ marketed on the Academy’s website, but this rebuilding of the castle captures the feeling of the region fairly well. Rebirth is on the minds of the administrators of Jilin Province; 2003 saw the launch of the Chinese government’s ‘Revitalise the North-East’ initiative, aimed at attracting tourism and investments from multinational corporations to Jilin. The ancient castle reborn in a fresh shell fits well with the Buddhist understanding of the old becoming new again, and the gradual reinvigoration of the local economy promises a rebirth of another kind for one of the poorest regions of Northern China.
Even more deceptively named than the Ancient Castle, the Serene Lake was accessed from the Academy by a long, long flight of steps. Running up them in the morning for our warm-up, I’d be exhausted by the time I reached around the two-hundredth step. By the three-hundredth the first two hundred would seem like a Golden Age of stair-climbing, and by the time I collapsed at the top of the steps I’d be no more serene than the castle was ancient. I asked my teacher if the running and the exhaustion were to teach mental clarity, to burn away distractions, and to help us to understand the Zen focus at the core of the Buddhist faith. Mostly, he said, it was to give us strong legs, and make us sweat.
So there you have it: Ye He, a place of big climbs, where the old is becoming new. Also a place which gives you strong legs, and makes you sweat. When I had the energy I’d head to one of the neighbouring hilltops at sunset. Looking down at the lake,the fortress walls and stone courtyards surrounding the not-very-ancient castle, I’d think with a fair amount of satisfaction, ‘Yeah, what a strange place I live in.’
Even more deceptively named than the Ancient Castle, the Serene Lake was accessed from the Academy by a long, long flight of steps. Running up them in the morning for our warm-up, I’d be exhausted by the time I reached around the two-hundredth step. By the three-hundredth the first two hundred would seem like a Golden Age of stair-climbing, and by the time I collapsed at the top of the steps I’d be no more serene than the castle was ancient. I asked my teacher if the running and the exhaustion were to teach mental clarity, to burn away distractions, and to help us to understand the Zen focus at the core of the Buddhist faith. Mostly, he said, it was to give us strong legs, and make us sweat.
So there you have it: Ye He, a place of big climbs, where the old is becoming new. Also a place which gives you strong legs, and makes you sweat. When I had the energy I’d head to one of the neighbouring hilltops at sunset. Looking down at the lake,the fortress walls and stone courtyards surrounding the not-very-ancient castle, I’d think with a fair amount of satisfaction, ‘Yeah, what a strange place I live in.’
K's Challenge
My challenge was a very up hill struggle. I had managed to convince myself that I was no good at my job and that I was useless, resulting in me being off work with stress/anxiety and not forgetting depression. No body had told me that I was no good, my mind had just told itself that this was the case. With support from people at home and work I have managed to get back on track life will always be a challenging but you should never feel so challenged that you can't get through it. I can now see that light at the end of the tunnel, I can now go out and not feel that everybody is looking at me I can go back to work knowing that I can do my job well, and that I have the support and love of all my family and friends. I am know looking forward to getting married in June and feel like my challenge is finally over. I look forward to over coming further challenges in the future.
