A young Australian who was relentlessly bullied after losing his mother to cancer at the age of 13 is calling on people to dig deep to help support Canteen Australia.
Jacob Boutcher’s world was turned upside down when his mother Jodie was diagnosed with the rare acute myeloid leukemia in 2013.
The Boutcher family was celebrating Jacob’s twelfth birthday when his mother felt unwell.
Doctors soon discovered she had cancer and she spent the next 18 months between Tasmania – where the family lived – and Melbourne for treatment, including two rounds of bone marrow transplants.
Jacob Boutcher (pictured) was constantly bullied after his mother died from a rare blood cancer
“She got to a stage where she might go into remission that she came to Tasmania, which was a surprise,” Jacob told NewsWire.
“We got to hang out for a bit, and then mum went back over (to Melbourne) for a check-up and everything hit the fan and her body started shutting down.”
Mr Boutcher, now 22 years old, remembers his last moments with his mother when she was in a medically induced coma.
“At that age, I was 13, I didn’t really know what was going on,” he said. “Nothing really clicked until the moments happened.
‘It was a very shocking experience and it was clearly a very vulnerable position to be in the room and have her life support taken off her.’
But as the teen tried to cope with his grief and learn how to navigate the world without his mother, his friends were not there to support him in his darkest hours.
“I went from being a 13-year-old boy who was naive about the world to a quickly growing up boy,” Mr. Boutcher said.
‘It was like going from a thirteen-year-old to an eighteen-year-old.
“My friends made ‘your mom’ jokes and silly, immature comments.
Mr Boutcher, who was just a teenager (pictured right) when his mother was diagnosed with the disease, said his world was turned upside down when she died
“I told them, ‘This isn’t funny to me anymore, you don’t know when the last moments are.’
‘I was very much on the outside.
“I put it down to the fact that they didn’t know how to express emotions to someone who has lost a parent, so their default was to make fun of them.
“But people I thought were my best friends pushed me out of my friendship circle.”
As he struggled to come to terms with all these emotions, he came across Canteen Australia’s Good Grief camp, which provides support to young Aussies who have dealt with cancer in their lives.
‘I was trying to find a new identity and figure out what it meant not to have a mother. I was very lonely during that time,” Boutcher said.
“But Canteen was able to help people who had been through similar experiences understand what I was going through.
‘We’re all one big, massive family (now), I was lucky to have made connections.
“Canteen allowed me to build so many new connections with people who were like-minded and understood the grief we were going through.
“It was a way to learn how to express the emotions I was feeling at that moment, and also to grieve because a parent had died of cancer.”
Canteen Australia has launched its latest fundraising campaign in the hope of raising $416,000 for young people affected by cancer.
Mr Boutcher (pictured) said he found much-needed support through Canteen Australia, a charity that helps young people affected by cancer
The campaign is encouraging people to make a taxable donation by June 30 to help children like Mr Boutcher get the support they need at a difficult time in their lives.
Mr Boutcher now lives in Melbourne and is studying to become a social worker to help children going through experiences similar to his.
He said he hopes to continue helping Canteen Australia and other people going through tough times.
“I just want to give back to people and know that there are kids out there who might feel alone and they don’t, to have a social worker who has also been affected by cancer and can understand it,” he said.