Running News Daily

Emma Knight says she wanted to fight the disease with everything she had and her care was second to none is running the Brighton 10k

Emma Knight found a lump in her chest last year and visited the doctors to have it checked.

The 44-year-old said: “About four weeks later I was diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer.

“I have two daughters, so the worst part of receiving that news is thinking of the impact it will have on my children.

“It’s heartbreaking and a really frightening thought.”

Emma decided she wanted to fight the disease with everything she had.

She said: “I knew if I let my head go to a bad place then I couldn’t expect my body to recover.

“I also knew I had to have a clear head to explain this to my children. That this would be difficult but I would be OK.

“They know enough to make the link between cancer and death. I wanted them to see that I was strong and that wasn’t always the case.”

Emma, who lives in Hanover, England with daughters Georgie and Nancy, began to write down her feelings in a blog online called Queen Emma Knight and said it “became a type of therapy.”

“It is very honest. I talk about everything very bluntly,” she said.  

“Somebody told me reading it was like white water rafting, I go from swearing to sharing my emotions, talking about getting a positive outcome from a pretty grim situation.

“People began reading it all over the world. It created quite a community and people I didn’t know were giving such positive feedback.

“One woman direct messaged me and said the blog was like somebody else was articulating exactly how she was feeling. Before that she felt like she had lost her voice, and I had given it back.”

Emma received 19 weeks of chemotherapy treatment at the Sussex Cancer Centre in Brighton and said her care was second to none.

So tomorrow she will be leading the charge as part of Knights Army, a team of 24 friends and family members who Emma says will be “running, jogging, walking and crawling” the Brighton 10K to raise money for the Sussex Cancer Fund.

She said that she is not going to win it, but is “celebrating the fact that my body is able to achieve this after the serious beating it’s taken.”