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My name is Mario Barlaba from Burton-On-Trent, Staffordshire.
And I was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. I ran a restaurant, an Italian restaurant
in Burton-On-Trent I'd been trading for five years, purely through
word of mouth. The business was a success.
Friday the 30th June -you don't forget these things
I was diagnosed. Everything just goes...
The insurance company turned around and said because cancer was an illness and not an accident
I wasn't covered. So basically everything just...I lost everything.
I couldn't really turn to anybody because all my family were in Italy.
I didn't want to leave anything on my kids. So totally, totally, no one to turn to.
You know everything happened at the same time. I lost my business, I lost my home, I got
the divorce papers. Got one foot in the grave and one out. All
bottled in. I was falling, falling from a great high and
there was no bottom. The way I found Pat, she was my Macmillan
Nurse Cancer Specialist and she was in the office when I got called
in to see the consultant. I didn't know what was happening, I was full
of fear, apprehension Seeing a doctor and a nurse, I didn't really
feel comfortable with regards to what I was going to be told.
I think any stressful situation you never actually take the full conversation in.
You only get parts of it, that's why I always talk to them after the consultation with the
doctor. Eventually I started opening up to her.
Because, you know, I saw how good she was. The council flat that I was given was just
an empty shell. there wasn’t a cooker, there wasn’t a
carpet. She arranged for a couple of cheques, one
was a Macmillan Grant which went towards the carpet.
Pat was there when I had everything ripped away from me.
Because I had no one else to turn to, she got the brunt of it.
She was phenomenal. She just accepted me for who I was
helped me through a lot of difficult times I just don't know where to stop.
I’m very proud to be a Macmillan nurse because I love helping people
and if I can help people throughout the journey, if it makes it a bit easier
then I’ve achieved an awful lot. That’s the thing that pushed me to want
to volunteer for Macmillan purely because of what Pat did for me, that
I wanted to give back to Macmillan Working in the Macmillan Centre, it helped
me start life again. What would I feel the world would be like
without Macmillan? No, can't see it.
Can't see it. Sorry. Can't see a world without Macmillan.
No if I've got to do with it anyway.