A young Australian who was relentlessly bullied after losing his mother to cancer when he was just 13 is urging people to do more to help support Canteen Australia.
Jacob Boutcher’s world was turned upside down when his mother, Jodie, was diagnosed with a rare acute myeloid leukemia in 2013.
The Boutcher family was celebrating Jacob’s 12th birthday when his mother felt unwell.
Doctors quickly discovered his cancer and he spent the next 18 months between Tasmania, where the family lived, and Melbourne for treatment, including two rounds of bone marrow transplant.
Jacob Boutcher (pictured) was constantly harassed after his mother died from a rare blood cancer.
“She was entering a stage where we could go into remission and she came to Tasmania, which was a surprise,” Jacob told NewsWire.
“We had to hang out, and then mom was going (to Melbourne) for a checkup again and everything went haywire and her body started shutting down.”
Boutcher, now 22, remembers those final moments with his mother as she lay in an induced coma.
“At that age I was 13 and 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 obviously being in the room and being taken off life support had been a very vulnerable position.”
But while the teenager tried to rectify his pain and learn to navigate the world without his mother, his friends weren’t there to support him in his darkest moments.
“I went from being a 13-year-old kid naïve to the world to maturing very quickly,” Boutcher said.
‘It was like going from the mentality of a 13-year-old to that of an 18-year-old.
‘My friends made ‘your mom’ jokes and silly, immature comments.
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 is no longer funny to me, you don’t know when the last moments are’.
“I was very outside.
‘I put it down to them not knowing how to express emotion to someone who had lost a parent, so their option was to make fun of them.
“But the people I thought were my best friends kicked me out of my circle of friends.”
As she struggled to learn how to process all of these emotions, she came across Canteen Australia’s Good Grief camp, which offers support to young Australians who have dealt with cancer in their lives.
“I was trying to find a new identity and figuring out what it meant to not have a mother. I felt very alone during that period of time,” Boutcher said.
‘But Canteen was able to help me make people who had gone through similar experiences understand what I was going through.
‘Now we are all one big family, I was lucky to have made connections.
‘Canteen allowed me to build many new connections with people who were like-minded and understood the pain we were going through.
“It was a way of learning to express the emotions I was feeling at that moment, and also grieving the death of one of my parents due to cancer.”
Canteen Australia has launched its latest fundraiser hoping to raise $416,000 for young people affected by cancer.
Boutcher (pictured) said she found much-needed support through Canteen Australia, a charity that helps young people affected by cancer.
The campaign encourages people to make a taxable donation by June 30 to help children like Boutcher get the support they need during a difficult time in their lives.
Boutcher now lives in Melbourne and is studying to become a social worker to help children going through similar experiences to his own.
He said he hopes to continue helping Canteen Australia and other people going through difficult times.
“I just want to give back to people and know that there are kids who may feel alone and who may not, have a social worker who has also been affected by cancer and can understand it,” she said.