AMAZING STORY OF
EXCLUSIVE FATE dealt Chris Berns and Laura Hunter the cruellest of blows... but then delivered the sweetest of gifts.
Teenage cancer had pushed the pair to the brink of despair.
But it would also bring them together and, against all the odds, they are now parents to Willow – a one-year-old who fills them with joy.
Chris, 31, and Laura, 29, met in 2010 at a sailing event for survivors of teenage cancer.
They began dating three years later and moved in together in 2018.
Both feared they had been left infertile after chemotherapy.
And that’s when fate played a far kinder hand.
Laura says: “Willow is just starting to walk and sometimes I have to pinch myself at how lucky we are. Every day we are grateful for what we have with her.
“Normally, before cancer treatment you are asked if you want to freeze your eggs and sperm, but that hadn’t been possible for either of us because we needed to start treatment so quickly. So we both believed we couldn’t have children.
“They told me it was unlikely I would be fertile after treatment because of how intense it was.”
BUNDLE
Chris adds: “Cancer took us to the darkest of places, but it also led us to find love, an extraordinary friendship with other survivors and also to have our miracle baby Willow.
“She is a little bundle of joy. Her smile melts our hearts.
“A lot of people ask if you could go back and change anything would you? I don’t think I would as it has made us the people we are now. I’ve met Laura, we have Willow – and have amazing friends.
“So even though it is this horrible thing that you’d never wish for anyone to go through, it is almost worth it in a way now, because of everything we have got.”
Chris and Laura from Walsall, West Mids, are medical secretaries.
His cancer journey began when he was 17 – as Midlands high jump champion and hoping to compete in the London 2012 Olympics.
Rare Ewing Sarcoma cancer, which affects tissue around bones, saw his weight plummet from 10½st to 7st. He was temporarily paralysed.
After 14 rounds of chemo, he was able to walk again and was a late addition to the sailing weekend that would change his life.
Meanwhile, Laura, 29, had 30 months of chemo for acute lymphoblastic leukaemia – a type of blood cancer. She was diagnosed in 2008, aged 16, and was also a latecomer for the sailing event.
Chris says: “If it hadn’t been for cancer, and the stage we were both at in our recovery, we would never have crossed paths.”
Of becoming parents, he adds: “We’d both assumed we wouldn’t be
I wouldn’t change anything ...cancer brought us together
ON FINDING LOVE AND BECOMING A DAD
fertile due to the chemo. We hadn’t used contraception for two years when I decided to go and get myself checked. To my amazement, the doctors said everything was okay.
“Then we were in lockdown and had to shield. We didn’t have the stresses of work and we think that helped in a way to get us pregnant.”
Laura says: “We were at the point
where we were about to seek help. And then it just happened. I had a feeling of total shock that we had done it without help and this little life was growing inside me. It was another silver lining.”
Chris tells of the day he learned a long-standing back problem was actually cancer.
He says: “One night I fell asleep on the floor and I woke up and my legs