About Me

Who am I? My story?

I am a former life and nutrition coach currently on a break, battling acute myeloid leukaemia since End Oct 2021. To date I have had 2 transplants. 1st one was on 8th March 2022 from my brother. The 2nd was on 26th October 2022 from my youngest daughter. I have been in the ICU for 3 days, had inflammation of the liver, blood in my stool, countless number of fevers and infections and had my PICC line taken out 6 times. This journey has been really amazing. So many highs and lows. So many times, God has shown me that he loved me. To read about how I discovered I had AML, click here*

Life is so much more than the bad things that happen to you. I’m here to share with you my journey and how God has helped me through it all. How many miracles I have had, the many angels that came into my life and more!

I had 3 sessions of chemotherapy plus 1 conditioning chemotherapy before I went for my transplant on 8th March 2022. Every time, I’d wait for my white blood counts to recover above 1 before I could be discharged. To say I spent a lot of time in hospital is an understatement.

THE RELAPSE


So you may think the story ended after I got my 1st transplant? Well, God had other plans for me. Within 3 months of the transplant, my doctor noticed my white blood count going down. I was admitted for a donor lymphocyte infusion. However, my white blood count never recovered even after that. My doctor did a bone marrow aspiration and they found that the cancer cells came back. I was put on oral chemotherapy. That started another 6 months of fighting infection and fever. It was decided I needed a 2nd transplant. Mine was a high-risk case because I relapsed within the 1st 3 months of the 1st transplant.

HOW I REACCEPTED GOD

 

This was during my 2nd hospital stay. My dad had gotten me watercolour postcards. As it was Christmas season, I decided to paint some Christmas postcards. I decided to send the cards as gifts to those around me, whom are the nurses and my doctor. The beautiful thing was these cards found their way to the Christmas tree outside of my room, in the ward. Can you imagine my surprise and delight when I walked out of my room for the first time on Christmas Eve to go for home leave? I had never seen it before because being immunocompromised meant that I stayed in my room and never went out of it.

I was so touched by what the nurses did. God revealed to me through the love and kindness from the nurses as they are like angels sent from God to tell me that I am not alone and He will fight this battle with me. It was at that point where I decided I wanted to have Jesus's armour to fight this battle with me. So I reaccepted Christ during Christmas 2021. Since then God has been really good to me.

BLESSED

How blessed I was and am throughout my whole ordeal.

I have good medical staff attending to me. My primary doctor, secondary doctor or doctors, all my ward nurses and clinic nurses and not to mention my transplant coordinator. It’s such a challenging job that you all do and yet you do it with love and smile on your faces. I love you all. That’s why I say I’m surrounded by angels throughout the journey.

I had friend who video called me regularly in hospital, regular video calls with my rabbit through my daughter, gifts and food, because friends were afraid I wasn’t eating well in hospital. I even had one friend who cooked for my entire first stay in hospital. How amazingly loved I am right?

Above photo is a collection of some of the food and gifts that I received in hospital. There are too many to put in here!

 

HOW I BECAME AN ARTIST

During my initial stay in the hospital, a friend gave me a watercolour set. My doctor encouraged me to give it a try. Being sceptical on the type of art I could produce, I was not confident. But eventually I plucked up the courage to give it a try. The initial stage of art I produced was sketchy, patchy , angry with a lot of angst and was sullen.

HOW I USED MY ART

I realised the joy I saw in peoples’ faces when I presented my art pieces to them as gifts. I feel blessed to be a blessing with my art. And the greatest gift I got back from them was LOVE. As days go by, my art pieces transformed amazingly. It went from painting of small postcards to larger pieces. The biggest one I did was on A4 . Gradually, I changed mediums from watercolour to gouache and then to acrylic. I can say that I am a self-taught artist even though I have an art mentor. He does not tell me how to paint but encourages me to do more and more.Below are some of the Christmas card orders I got during Christmas of 2021.

Below are all paintings gifted out to others around me

   

 

As you may already realise, gifting and blessings are a big theme in my whole journey, even to today. That’s why I set up this website, so that I can share more of my art with more people. To me, it’s simply a joy and service to gift people a unique artwork made from the heart. Check out my originals, prints for sale and downloads! Hope it brings you as much joy as it did for me.

Art as Self Therapy

Little did I realise that my art was also one of my coping strategies in dealing with the shocking and sudden change to my lifestyle. As you can see, I had an obsession with hair because at first I couldn’t deal with my beautiful coloured hair dropping.