‘I Wanted To Make A Difference'

We meet the mother raising funds and campaigning for more lifesaving stem cell donors after her son was diagnosed with a blood cancer

- Katharine Wootton

June McCleave’s son, Pete, had always been full of energy. Like the Duracell bunny, he just kept going and going, setting himself challenge after challenge, from bike races to marathons, to taking his pilot’s licence.

But one day everything changed, as he became unwell the evening after completing the notoriously gruelling Ironman triathlon. “I heard him being sick in the night, but we thought it was just exhaustion from the race,” says mum June (68). As the next few days went on Peter got worse until a visit to the doctors revealed he had Legionnaire’s disease, later leading to sepsis, pneumonia and scarring on his lung. But it was while having hospital tests for all these conditions that the doctors made the worst discovery of all. Pete had myeloma, a type of blood cancer that develops in the bone marrow. The whole family were devastated.