My belief that adversity makes us stronger is reinforced by some research done by Dr Nick Bayles, reported in Paul and Jenny Geelen’s blog.
Dr Bayles talks about planes taking off into the wind, which reminds me of a quote I love. It’s by Churchill, and it says, “Kites fly highest against the wind, not with it”.

I was talking today with someone who was wondering whether to offer my book, ‘Beyond the Red Door’, to parents of a very young child with bilateral retinoblastoma. Their little girl has just had one eye removed and extensive treatment to the other eye. The treatment has been successful and it looks like her sight has been saved.
The concern was how much information the parents could handle at this very stressful time. And it’s a good question. My parents went through hell when I was diagnosed. Things moved very quickly and they had no control. How would they have felt knowing that retinoblastoma didn’t just end when the treatment ended and the tumours disappeared?
When thinking about this, I went back to the main message behind my book. And that is, there is life after retinoblastoma. I want parents of kids with RB to know that living with vision loss is ok, and even living with total blindness is ok too. I’ve had both, and actually found that since I lost my sight totally, my life has improved out of sight…sorry for the pun.
Yes, I do make people aware of the links RB has with secondaries later in life, but it is only a possibility. It is not a definite. I know adults with RB who are much older than me, and they’re fine. I think my reason for mentioning it in my book is to inform parents, so that they can act if they see anything out of the ordinary. My parents would have preferred knowing this extra information as they watched me grow up. So I can only hope that other parents would see it the same way.
But as I said, my main message is that kids who have had RB cope really well with limited vision and blindness. And the big difference is that the treatment these days is so much better than in my day and there are less side-effects.
Here’s something to make parents feel good. I’ve heard it said often - from doctors and other RB survivors - that kids born with RB are more intelligent than others. No idea why they think this, but I’ll buy it!

I’ve given Chapter Four of ‘Beyond the Red Door’ the title of Invisible Scars. In this chapter, I describe my struggles with that difficult time we all go through - adolescence.
Just being a teenager is hard enough to survive with the emphasis on fitting in, looking good, and knowing yourself. Add to that the extra pressures of having a disability, which immediately sets you apart from the rest, and being adopted and without a solid foundation to fall back on.
These were the issues I had to deal with as a teenager going through high school. In my transition to high school, I lost the strong and confident qualities I had as a child. It was as though they had been sucked away from me. I was left with low self-esteem, no confidence and no idea of who I really was. My adoption issues came to the fore without any prompting, making me feel different because I didn’t know anything about my past. And this was on top of feeling different because I was vision impaired.
At this time, too, the long term effects of the radiotherapy I had as a baby started to show themselves. This meant frightening vision changes, many treatments and surgery with an uncertain result.
How do kids ride the rough times in adolescence? The answer to this depends on a lot of things. Read how I survived the bullying and teasing and depression I suffered in my teenage years.
Looking back now, I can see how I built my resilience. With this knowledge, I hope to help teenagers today to build their own resilience and survive adolescence.

I promised I’d give an outline of each chapter in the book, so let’s continue.
You find out about the red door in chapter three of ‘Beyond the Red Door’.
I met the red door when I was about eight years old. I’d just been transferred to a school for the blind to learn braille, because the doctors thought I’d go blind very early on in my life. The first thing I saw at the school was this red door. It spoke of a warning to me, indicated somehow that the route I wanted to take in life was barred. It was a challenge.
And I took up the challenge. That’s where the rebel in me came out, where I learned to stand up for myself and maintain my identity. I wasn’t about to change who I was and no-one could tell me otherwise.
It was during this time that I discovered that I could only see out of one eye. Before that, nothing had fazed me. But realising that half my world was ‘missing’ came as a huge shock. Why did this happen? Purely because I was at this school and had been told that I was there because I couldn’t see very well, that I was legally blind.
It’s one of those sad ‘we know best’ stories that are dotted throughout history, the well-meaning experts who actually can cause more harm than good. As a child, I could only do what was within my powers to survive. What lay ahead was beyond my control.