Every year, Zinc runs a charity fundraiser to support a cause that’s important to our employees. In 2024, we cycled all the way from London to Paris in support of Children’s Liver Disease Foundation.
This year, we’re paddling 66 kilometers along the Thames, from Abingdon to Henley, in support of Leukaemia UK. Zinc will match all donations to help support life-saving research that makes a difference in the lives of Leukaemia patients and survivors.
In 2014, my husband Chris was a young, fit, 27-year-old, serving as a sergeant in the British Army. He was also living with leukaemia. He just didn’t know it yet.
Everyone thinks their partner is incredible, but Chris (or CJ, as his family calls him) has a truly remarkable story. Over more than a decade of uncertainty, he’s shown incredible bravery. Even though he’s a pretty private person, he’s agreed to let me tell his story in the hope that it will raise awareness and aid Zinc’s fundraising efforts.
How it started
For somewhere between 6 and 12 months before his diagnosis, Chris had been experiencing symptoms like dizziness after exercise, tiredness, and a drop in his general fitness.
One incident that stands out to him was when he was put forward for a promotional course in the army and failed the required fitness test.
“I failed the timed mile and a half run by seconds,” he told me, “and I was exhausted and dizzy. I couldn’t understand how it had happened.”
Instead of thinking something was wrong, he was embarrassed and assumed it was his fault. “I just thought I need to train harder. In the Army you don’t think: ‘I’m ill.’ You think: ‘Man up.’”
He started napping after work, but he was training harder than ever. He attributed the tiredness to his increased physical output. On top of this, he had just become a Dad for the first time and was dealing with the newborn days — exhaustion was expected.
One evening, he lay down and noticed something unusual. “One side of my stomach sat higher than the other. It looked wrong. I Googled it, laughed at the worst-case answers, and thought, ‘Not me.’”
Chris’ diagnosis ended up coming almost by accident. Towards the end of a training session, he had to perform a fireman’s carry but he was so tired that when he lifted his friend onto his shoulders, a spinal disc prolapsed and he was sent to medical.
During the examination of his back, he mentioned the stomach swelling to the doctor and after suggesting it did look odd, the doctor ran blood tests.
Later that evening he woke to multiple missed calls and a message telling him to go to hospital immediately. Turns out that lump in his abdomen was his spleen, enlarged to four times its normal size.
The diagnosis
Within 24 hours he was diagnosed with Chronic Myeloid Leukaemia.
CML is a rare (less than 1% of all cancer diagnosis), slow-growing cancer of the blood-forming cells in the bone marrow, mainly affecting white blood cells. It usually affects people between 60-66 years old, so CJ was one of only around 28 patients under 30 years old who get diagnosed each year.
“The doctor told me he didn’t know how I was still standing,” Chris said. “My white blood cell count was in the thousands.”
His son was exactly a month old on the day he was diagnosed. He had to stay in hospital for two weeks for chemo and this was followed by targeted drugs known as TKIs (tyrosine kinase inhibitors). No one could tell him what his long-term prognosis was.
“I didn’t know if I had five years…ten years, or less. So I assumed the worst.”
Alongside the shock of cancer came another realisation. Chris would be classed as non-deployable and medically discharged from the army. “The Army defined me,” he said. “I joined at sixteen. That's who I was.”
Normally, a soldier leaving the Army receives around a year of structured transition support in the form of resettlement training, career guidance and time to adjust, but Chris didn’t take that year.
“I panicked…I had a mortgage. A newborn baby. I didn’t think I had time to wait.”
He asked to leave, and within a day he was out. No transition training, no preparation for civilian life. Just a 27-year-old newly diagnosed with cancer trying to work out how to provide for his family.
Looking back, that abrupt exit had consequences. “The civilian world was completely different,” he said. “Not technically difficult, but culturally. HR, behaviour, communication. I was out of my depth and I didn’t even realise it.”
CJ took on any work he could get, even scaffolding and lorry driving while looking for a more permanent position. He’d always worked, so while he should’ve been resting he was pushing harder than ever in a bid to keep everything together.
Unsurprisingly, his mental health started deteriorating rapidly.
“I didn’t even believe in mental health issues before that,” he admitted. “I thought it was a weakness.”
At his lowest point, he felt completely detached from his own life. His marriage broke down and he had to move in with his parents. He had a lot of days where he felt that he didn’t want to carry on. When a cancer diagnosis comes, this is what gets missed — the ripple effects.”
“I was Chris Dawson, but I didn’t want to be Chris Dawson any more. I wanted to be anyone else. I just wanted to run away from my own life.”
From a treatment perspective, Chris’ recovery also took much more time than the doctors had expected. The blood results they had hoped to see in six months took six years. Because of this, there were multiple moves from one medication to another to try to improve the results and reduce side effects like bone pain and rashes.
“For years I assumed I wouldn’t live past sixty,” he said. “No one had told me otherwise.”
The treatment for CML (TKIs) were only given full approval for use in 2001, so there are only a few hundred people Chris’ age who have been on this amazing medication for this long. This unfortunately means that at times, no one has had the answers he has wanted.
Today, Chris is re-married (lucky him!), works full time (as always!), and shares custody of his son. He still has leukaemia and sees his consultant every three months, but he is living a full life that once felt out of reach.
At an appointment in 2022 we finally were told there was no reason Chris shouldn’t expect a normal life expectancy. This was eight years after diagnosis. In a very surreal moment, this was also the appointment that he was advised he could return to full-time employment. We laughed.
Remission
Recently, Chris was also offered the possibility of treatment-free remission, meaning that if his blood markers remain stable, he may be able to stop taking daily medication under close supervision.
I was ecstatic and grinning from ear-to-ear. He was finally (11 years on) almost recovered — but when the option was first raised, Chris felt lost.
“It took so much away from me — if I don’t have cancer any more, what was it all for?”
That sentence stayed with me. In a strange way, CML defined him and became his reason for needing to start his life over again. The idea of removing that from his identity feels unexpectedly unsettling.
Why we’re fundraising for Leukaemia UK
Every cancer journey is different. There’s no linear path and no perfect scenario. Behind the statistics are people with dreams, fears, responsibilities, mortgages and families. Cancer is destabilising, and certainty evaporates on the day of a diagnosis.
Research into targeted treatments like TKIs is the reason Chris is here, and the reason we are able to plan for our future. Zinc are taking on this canoe challenge because of that research and for people in hospital rooms hearing the word ‘leukaemia’. If sharing his story helps raise awareness or funds for better treatments, then every paddle stroke will be worth it.
If you want to help us fund life-saving research, share Chris’s story or donate here.
