Double cancer survivor Courtney Hughes starts her new life this week, fired up for her new career by the love nurses at Canberra Hospital showed her.
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"They were like bedside angels," she said as she prepared to start her own new career as a nurse.
Twice she has defeated leukaemia - and the care she had in the fight inspired her to get a nursing degree between bouts of the illness.
She puts on what she calls her "navy-blue scrubs", and moves from one side of the bed to the other.
"My life has revolved around being a patient for so long. I just want to be a nurse now. I'm ready to be a nurse now," she said.
"I'm ready to stand on the other side of the bed."
She will stand on the other side of the bed on her first shift at Cooma Hospital.
She first contracted leukaemia in 2020 and spent 11 weeks in Canberra Hospital undergoing chemotherapy and other treatments.
She then had a bone marrow transplant in Sydney, with her sister as the donor.
Initially, all seemed well and Courtney went into remission. The experience prompted her to study for three years and graduate as a registered nurse.
But just before starting work in January last year, the cancer returned, and she was back at square one in Canberra Hospital. She spent the Christmas before last there.
Again, the nurses were fabulous.
"They made cancer bearable. In Canberra, I was not a number, I was a person."
The search for a second bone marrow donor started. This time, no suitable match was found in Australia and an international database provided an anonymous donor from Germany.
She received her second bone marrow transplant on May 22 last year.
It has worked - and Courtney now becomes the giver of love and care rather than the recipient of it.
"It's a third shot at life. If I hadn't had that transplant, I wouldn't have survived."
But this is an important part for her: Australia needs more bone marrow donors.
The second donor had to be from abroad because the Australian bone marrow registry was, as she put it, "very, very poor. There are barely any donors listed".
She urged Australians to register. Donating bone marrow does not endanger the donor's health. The body replenishes what has gone.
But donating really is life-giving. "It's quite literally saving someone's life. It's life or death," the double survivor said.
"Give someone a second chance at life," is the slogan of Stem Cells Australia, one of the organisations through which people aged 18 to 35 can register. The Australian Red Cross also organises ways to register.
Despite the life-saving benefits, Australians have been slow in coming forward.
The Leukaemia Foundation calculated that "every year, more than 600 Australians with blood cancer will need donated stem cells".
"Some patients find a matched donor in their family, but more than half will need stem cells from a matched but unrelated individual."
But the lack of matches means recipients and their doctors have to look abroad, and that is costly in terms of time and money.
"Currently, about three in four of all stem cell donations are sourced from overseas donors.
"This can cause complications as donor cells need to travel far distances to reach patients who need to receive the new stem cells quickly."
- For more information, visit abmdr.org.au.
