He and Vorajee dared to make plans for their future as a family. The transplant was successful, unleashing in Cain what he writes of as “a tidal wave of relief and happiness … pure joy.” Azaylia’s only hope would be a stem cell transplant – a high-risk procedure that medics warned would “wipe out her entire system”. The cancer returned rapidly after the initial treatment. The problem was, for every shred of good news there followed a massive body blow of bad news. She might not have survived her first round of chemotherapy, but she did. Azaylia could have died within a day or two of her diagnosis, but she pulled through. As his daughter clung on to life, Cain clung to hope like a life raft. “So that even though every day of her life she’s in pain, she can smile, she can be happy. He insisted on a positive atmosphere within Azaylia’s hospital room, so that she might not know anything was wrong. Covid restrictions meant Cain and Vorajee had to do shifts in their daughter’s room, and couldn’t be there together. “I kept expecting the good news, the note of hope of optimism, but none came instead it was … the worst type of cancer … And I crumbled.” What followed was a nightmarish six months in which Birmingham Children’s Hospital became the family’s home. “As the doctors spoke, it was as though each successive word out of their mouths sent me into a worse place,” Cain writes. When Azaylia was diagnosed in October 2020 with acute myeloid leukaemia – a rare and aggressive form of the disease that progresses quickly – he initially went numb. Cain, though deeply worried, did not suspect cancer. Only when a small raised bruise appeared on her skin, as well as some strange mottling, did the GP advise her parents to take her straight to A&E. Until, one day, spots of blood appeared in Azaylia’s nappy, followed by white spots on her tongue. Her parents were initially reassured by the doctor: it might be a feeding issue, it might be constipation, it might be colic. When we meet at his publisher’s office in London’s Bloomsbury Square, he says, with characteristic frankness: “When I had my daughter, I felt my life was complete.” But when Azaylia was a few weeks old, the first signs that something wasn’t right began appearing: she became unsettled, badly congested, suffered cold and flu symptoms and her belly was bloated and hard. In his heart-wrenching new memoir, Strong, he describes the feeling that “swept through me like an emotional tidal wave” when his daughter was born: “A mix of love and fear and a vast, almost overwhelming sense of responsibility.” While his career path took him from football (which a succession of injuries led him to quit) to television (he became known for an MTV show called Ex on the Beach), he had always longed to be a father. Growing up in Warwickshire, Cain was a bright and sporty boy. But compared with what Cain has already suffered, the dangers of his relentless endurance challenges pale into insignificance. He will have to face down everything from hypothermia to grizzly bears. Next month, he flies to Canada to undertake the Yukon challenge, a thousand-mile kayak race through the Arctic Circle to Alaska, which results in fatalities every year.
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