I’m Janna, and I’m the Programs Officer for Arrow.

I look after our patient support program that helps bone marrow transplant patients and their families manage all the extra costs they have to juggle during treatment. This could be providing a grocery or petrol gift card, paying a household bill, or help covering the cost of temporary accommodation while they are away from home for treatment.

The patients we help are really unwell. Many of them are facing blood cancer, and it’s a tough disease to beat. People often get a diagnosis one day and can sometimes be in hospital starting treatment the next. It’s a huge and sudden disruption to their lives that no one is ever prepared for. Your whole life is turned on its head, and you don’t really know for how long.

Bone marrow transplants are amazing and life-saving, but they’re also pretty tough to get through. Treatment can take many months, and recovery sometimes longer. Patients need to be in or near a hospital for most of that time. Transplant recipients are really vulnerable to infection for a good while after transplant, and they can get really sick really quickly. They need a carer with them pretty much the whole time.

Not every hospital is a bone marrow transplant centre, so that means that families often have to leave home to receive treatment. For families that are from regional centres they have to either uproot the whole family to a bigger town for treatment, or if it is Mum or Dad that is sick, sometimes both parents have to go and find someone else to stay at home and look after the kids. I often hear of situations like that where the family is effectively running two households and neither parent is able to work. Finances are really strained.

It is these families with kids that really hit home to me in my job. As a mum myself, that could so easily be me in that situation. It makes me realise how lucky I am to have everyone in my family healthy.

I love my job. It is so rewarding. It is super busy. We get a lot of requests. Last year I processed over 700 requests for help. But I know that behind every single one of the applications, there is a family that is it at their most vulnerable and it is great to know that my job makes a difference to their lives.