Cranbrook school boy has been given the all clear after being diagnosed with blood cancer

KentOnline / KMTV

Two years ago Sebastian Watt-Bonar's friends and teachers shaved their heads to raise money for the hospitals that treated him.   A bone marrow transplant saved his health, but Seb says it took much more than that to get through life during and after cancer.

Transcript

00:00Without my friends I wouldn't be here, I'll be honest.

00:02Because my friends, they gave me motivation and all that and they were, you know, distractions

00:07from everything that was going on. So without them it would be a completely different story.

00:13The message from a now 17-year-old who got through chemotherapy,

00:17radiotherapy and a bone marrow transplant to now be cancer-free.

00:22But without his friends it wouldn't have been possible.

00:25This was Sebastian Wattbonner two years ago, watching on from his hospital bed

00:30while his school friends in Cranbrook shaved their heads,

00:32all to raise money for those hospitals who helped save his life.

00:36At just 15-years-old, Seb was diagnosed with leukaemia.

00:40Now that bone marrow infusion has given him the all-clear.

00:43But while Seb and his family feel relief from those two words,

00:47the tricky few years have taken a toll on him.

00:50When I started treatment, I thought that it's just going to be all physical.

00:55It's just going to be, I know it's going to be physical, it's just going to be tough.

01:00But, you know, I didn't really think about the mental side of it.

01:05I'd say through treatment, I had a goal, right, to, you know, to get better, to get well,

01:11just like take the next step. So when it was all coming to the end of everything, you know,

01:18that's when the kind of the more mental things come with, like,

01:22like the insecurities and like the self-confidence and then like

01:26just processing like actually what just happened to you.

01:31He says he'll be in debt to the nurses who cared for him

01:34and the bone marrow donor for the rest of his life.

01:37I think about, I just think about them every day,

01:39doing all the charity workers and all the kitchen staff, literally everything.

01:45Like, I think about them every day because, like, I just think about,

01:49randomly, like, I'm, you know, I'm walking down the street, I was like,

01:52there's, you know, one reason you're walking right now and that is because of them.

01:57And it was that attitude and determination from the very start that helped Seb and his

02:02family through something that could have been devastating,

02:06echoed by what his parents told me back in 2023.

02:11It's frightening, sometimes, and it's a big thing.

02:17But Sebastian said very early on, and it was a quiet moment, he said that,

02:22Dad, my first thought, my very first thought when I heard this diagnosis

02:27and I understood what it meant was, I'm going to survive.

02:33Seb's not battling to just survive anymore.

02:36Instead, working out how to live as any other 17-year-old boy would.

02:42Abbey Hook for KMTV.

Category

Transcript

Recommended