Natia Cancer Journals

Having chemo, 2016.

My life up until that point had been pretty normal. I grew up in North London, with my older sister and artist parents. At aged ten my family emigrated to South Africa and I spent the formative years of my life in the beautiful city of Cape Town.

After graduating from high school, I set off on a gap year, which turned into intrepid backpacking expedition across South America. I hitchhiked through Chile and Bolivia, worked in a Peruvian surf hostel, painted murals in Ecuador and sailed from Colombia to Panama, before finally returning to South Africa to study English literature at the University of Cape Town.

Traveling South America, 2017.

As I was approaching the final year of my studies, I discovered a small, painful lump in my neck. Leading up to this I’d had all kinds of strange symptoms from fatigue to drenching night sweats, but I passed these off as indicative of my fast-paced lifestyle. The idea that I could possibly have cancer just didn’t seem plausible.

Yet there I was, ten days later, lying in a hospital bed with plastic tubes coming out of my body. The next six months unfolded in a blur of fortnightly infusions, nausea and dreaded hospital visits. In the midst of all the pain and confusion of my diagnosis, I began to write about my experiences.

Growing up I would scribble profusely into dog-eared journals. But never did I feel such a burning compulsion to write as when I was sick. It was as if through pain, I found my voice. I wrote about losing my hair, about my struggles with body image, about falling in love with a musician whose father was also dying of cancer, about pain and self-love and my newfound appreciation for life.

I realised that no matter what this disease took from me, it could never take my voice.

By the end of 2016 I had reached remission and finished my degree, and so I set off, once again, for the rugged mountains and glittering oceans of South America. The truth is, I just wanted to get as far away from the hospital ward and everything I had come to associate with being ill.

After a year of volunteering in the Amazon jungle and teaching English, I moved to the UK to begin a graduate degree in journalism. Then, one month into my course, the unthinkable happened. Another lump, another bout of biopsies and to my horror, a relapse. I was 25.

Relapse, 2018.



Instead of taking a leave of absence, I chose to continue my course while undergoing chemotherapy. This time however, chemo didn’t seem to work and after 6 months of worsening scans, I started to lose hope. During this period, devastatingly, my mother also passed away from dementia. The loss was overwhelming. I remember feeling as if my entire life was falling apart.

I truly believe writing saved me from the darkest depths of despair. I wrote through the pain, through the grief, through the moments of confusion and emptiness. I was placed on a clinical trial, which gave me access to immunotherapy, a miracle drug that finally begun to shrink my tumours. In August 2019, a year after my relapse, I underwent a bone marrow transplant using my sisters stem cells, a procedure which saved my life.

My sister and I on the day of our transplant, 2019.



Despite surviving cancer for a second time, I remember feeling like it all would have been a lot easier if I’d had a stronger support network.

When I met John, a fellow cancer survivor and the founder of Natia Cares, we bonded over our mutual desire to help those struggling with this illness.

Hence the idea for an online project that would bring together those going through treatment. The NatiaCares Cancer Journal is thus a communal space where those affected by cancer can connect with other like-minded souls, through the written word.

Sign up below to become part of the community and receive the first prompt. The project will begin on July 9th.

We so look forward to connecting with you and hearing your incredible stories of survivorship.