Creating the Support I Needed
Stewart (they/them) was diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukaemia as a young adult when he was living in Berlin, Germany.
In this podcast for Lymphoma Action, a UK blood cancers organization, Stewart talks about the lack of resources available to LGBTQ+ people and how this spurred them to found a peer support group for other LGBTQ+ patients (which developed into the UK charity OUTpatients).
“There were no LGBT specific services or support. And when I also asked for them, I was met with this sort of disbelief “oh, isn’t it crazy that you would want that? And also that it doesn’t already exist?” So, I spent a few years almost not asking for the help and thinking, well, this is just the way things are. And what happened was that severely affected my mental health. So it got to the point where it’s like “I need to have these conversations and I wonder if anybody else needs to have them too?”
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You can also watch Stewart talking about OUTpatients here. OUTpatients provides a safe space for anyone who identifies as part of the queer spectrum and has had an experience with any kind of cancer – at any stage.
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