I spent the next three months travelling around Mexico and the U.S. with a very sore knee. I then began the second leg of my journey - the U.K. I was planning on living there and working for two years. I did everything I could, as a 22yr old in a foreign country, to get myself treated. I saw doctors but to be treated in the U.K. you need to be registered and that takes FOREVER!

So I started seeing a physiotherapist. He was Australian too so I trusted him. He put me on crutches and started treating me for a torn ACL. $450 pounds and three months later, after countless lectures about how I was not doing enough exercises and that I wasn't being careful enough, I finally gave up on my physio and went home. I was booked in for ACL surgery and had a return ticket back to London six weeks later...

"I never went back"

The first surgeon I saw back in Australia took ten seconds examining my knee and said "it's not your ACL". I wish he'd been there in London.

I had an osteosarcoma eating away at my knee bones. I was facing six months of chemo - the two most nauseating drugs - cisplatin and doxyrubicin, and extensive surgery replacing half my femur (thigh bone) and the top of my tibia with titanium.

"Chemo was worse than I ever imagined"

During the first round the nurses forgot to give me the key anti-nausea drug. It was the worst twelve days of my life and I truly wished I was dead. It didn't get any better. Throughout chemo I had nausea, unexplained vomiting, extensive pain in my knee, hot flushes from the fertility drugs, depression, severe anxiety attacks, hemorrhoids, body aches, yeast infections, constipation, sore throat, I had blood transfusions, I had to have a needle in my stomach every day for blood clots, I was in a wheelchair...the list goes on.

For every three weeks, I had about five days of feeling well enough to socialise and go places. But as many of you will know, being bald, and not to mention in a wheelchair, is not the way you want to present yourself to the world. So I missed a lot during those six months. In many ways I feel like I lost my life. I lost friends who didn't contact me, I lost my self-esteem...I lost my passion for life.

Now I'm at the other end, and I struggle to find the positives of cancer in the way that so many other cancer survivors do. And for those out there who haven't dealt with cancer in any way I need to say - please don't be mistaken by survivor's stories about cancer being a 'gift that keeps giving'. Cancer is hell. And it takes more than it gives back.

But for the other survivors out there, I will say this - I now have a closer relationship with my Mum and Dad. I tell them everything and trust them one hundred percent.

"I have realised who my true friends are"

the friends that I will do anything for, as they have done for me. My sense of empathy has grown ten-fold - I feel others' pain deeply and want to do everything in my power to make it go away. I feel I have matured beyond my years. These are the thoughts I hold tightly to, as I face my daily struggle of getting my life back.