Your Style Servant

By age thirteen, I’d dodged a death sentence once and was gearing up to do it again. 

At three months old, Bilateral Retinoblastoma was a cancerous culprit present in both my retinas at birth, stealing my right eye despite treatment efforts. At thirteen years old, Osteosarcoma became my new attacker, taking seven months of my life to fight and ultimately costing me my left leg.

Despite having core parts of my identity stripped down to their bare bones, I still had my steadfast sense of style – a part of myself I’d explored for as long as I could pull a shirt over my own head.

Every week I was admitted for another round of treatment, nurses would gather around my wheelchair to see the outfit I’d put together and how I’d accessorized. My face grew paler through the week, but my earrings were an iconic and ever-present burst of colour.

My style was still going through puberty then, but for as long as I can remember, I have expressed myself through clothing. That expression became a reliable lifeline when everything around me – myself included – threatened to collapse.

Three years into remission, I found myself at a peak point in a career I didn’t plan on having but was well-equipped to dress for: being a public figure.

From my mid-teen years as an active journalist to being a motivational speaker representing SickKids and The Terry Fox Foundation, I began assembling my uniform – my signature style – to match the fast-paced professionalism of the fields. In 2016, I became that year’s Terry Fox Poster Girl, leading me to tour Ontario for two months delivering presentations to elementary and high schools, post-secondary institutions, businesses, commerce, and corporate events alike, helping raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for research advancement. This was just an eight week highlight of the career I pursued for the better part of a decade.