Blood running

Over the last year, I've done some ridiculous things. I've run a marathon, a half marathon, climbed the tallest peak in the UK, baked hundreds of cakes and have been the middlewoman betwen you and a Tesla Coil and a Delorean. It has been my attempt to maintain control at an uncontrollable time in my life. It's been a truly remarkable year and a half.

My parents started chemo the same week in July 2015, in hospitals thousands of miles from one another, thousands of miles from me. Both with blood cancer. I had moved to the US from the UK one month earlier, for reasons that had nothing to do with their illnesses.

When I arrived, no one knew they were going to fall ill.

Now, one is in remission. The other is no longer with us: he died on 1 January 2015. Both were (and are) the recipients of extraordinary immunotherapy treatments that didn't exist five years ago but are actually saving lives today.

There are three ways you can help this cause.

First: a one-off donation. Thank you.

Second: you can sponsor a baked good that will be delivered to the Cancer Support Community in Los Angeles for one of their regular free Friday events. Details are in the updates: prices range from $10-$30.

Third: you can commission friend-of-the-cause Steve Thompson to play a song of your choosing on a Tesla Coil ($40), Theramin ($20), laser harp ($20) or Tenori ($20).

Your donation will go towards the future of astonishing treatments that are being dreamed up in laboratories, college classrooms, night visions, medical fantasies that will help people like my parents see tomorrow.

Please support this cause. Thank you.