I will put cancer behind me.. and start to put away criminals
TEEN
WHEN other teenagers were hanging out with their friends and moving on with school life, Natasha McNeil was battling cancer.
She lost her beautiful long hair during treatment and missed school so she couldn’t sit her exams.
But she says the experience has made her more determined to make the most of her life and now she’s focused on becoming a lawyer.
Natasha, from Glasgow, has just turned 16 and will soon be finishing treatment for Hodgkin lymphoma – a type of blood cancer. It’s one of the most common cancers diagnosed in 13-24-year-olds.
She’s featured in documentary Growing Up With Cancer, which airs tonight at 7pm on BBC 1.
Every day in the UK seven teenagers find out they have cancer. The programme focuses on some of the patients at the Teenage Cancer Trust Unit at Glasgow’s Queen Elizabeth University Hospital.
Natasha first felt a lump under her left arm in January so went to her doctor and was referred for tests. She was convinced it would only be a cyst.
She was sent to Glasgow’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital for biopsy results on January 4 and was shocked to be told it was cancer. She said: “I went in feeling OK about it, thinking it will be nothing, maybe a cyst that needs to be drained. And then I had that news.
“When you’re told you’ve got cancer, it’s scary because you’ve got all these thoughts running through your mind and you don’t know anything at this point.
“I couldn’t hear anything and I couldn’t see as my eyes were filled up with tears – just everything was rushing through my head.”
Natasha says it helped to have the comfortable Teenage Cancer Trust Unit at the hospital, with its pool table, juke box and PlayStation, as a place to relax with other youngsters being treated.
Natasha admits knowing she was going to lose her long hair due to cancer treatment was hard.
“My first thought was ‘I’m going to lose my hair’, and I loved my hair more than anything,” she explained.
She made the decision to splash out £160 on having her naturally brown hair dyed blonde – before she lost it all.
“I thought, ‘My hair’s going to all fall out so I’ll have a change.”
She added: “I’d been trying to keep it
Before, I thought, ‘I’ll never walk out bald’. Now I don’t care if people look NATASHA McNEIL