Ciara McGeehan

Thank you so much for having me, Andrew.

Talking about the highs and lows of that and the lessons I've learned through my running career, I never envisioned that it would be interspersed with something so probably life changing and crushing as a cancer diagnosis in the journey through that chemo.

But whenever I was chatting to Cliona about it, I was like,

I don't want this to be like a really sad book.

And don't get me wrong, I think I've made people cry and I do apologise, this is not my aim.

It's been a huge failure.

It's just the nature of the beast of the diagnosis and what I'm going through.

But I wanted the overall message to be one of hope.

And I really hope that shines through, that even in the face of what I'm going through, I'm finding things to be happy about.

And listen, there's people in situations far worse than me

that I observe and they're still finding hope and happiness every day.

Whenever I look around at what's happening in the world, South Sudan and Gaza and you see things and you're like, those people are still finding a way to make their children smile.

They're still finding something to laugh about and

I see it as an act of defiance.

I see it as like, I'm not going to let cancer win.

And that's what I hope that everybody else can take away from that, that no matter what struggle you're going through, you can have happiness and you should find that happiness.

And interestingly, somebody did talk to me and say, it's really hard because whenever you're going through something so tough, you nearly feel guilty for finding joy in other things because you should just feel sad about that one thing.

I think it's tough for everybody who's interviewing me.

I feel sorry for you, Joe, because it's a really tough thing to know what to say to somebody in my situation.

I don't know what to say to somebody in my situation.