One man bravely shared his journey with a double cancer diagnosis after initially brushing symptoms aside.
24-year-old Will Benyon, from South Wales, had always considered himself a fit and healthy man, but ended up receiving two diagnoses in three years.
A life-long football enthusiast, Will has played for his local club from the age of six, and always tried to keep active outside of his marketing job. Whilst club activities were suspended during the COVID-19 pandemic, Will turned to jogging around his hometown of LLanddarog to try and keep fit.
Whilst he jogged, however, he felt a constant mild pain in his left leg, akin to a strained muscle. He assumed it was nothing and simply brushed it off, whilst doctors believed a blood clot was causing the pain. Little did he know, this minute pain would end up changing his life.
After numerous scans and tests, it was discovered that there was a cancer growing in Will’s left leg. Plus, just two years later, Will would receive a second cancer diagnosis.
The realisation that something was wrong came in January 2021, when Will embarked on a jog in a bout of keep-fit New Year’s spirit. In an interview with WalesOnline, he said: “When everyone was doing their 5ks during lockdown in 2020, I joined in.
“I saw it as a way of keeping my mind off the fact that we were all stuck in our houses and keeping myself active and fit.”
He continued: “But whenever I went out jogging, I would always end up pulling a muscle in my calf. I didn’t think anything of it. But one day – I’ll remember it for the rest of my life, I went for a run in January 2021.
“Everyone had their New Year’s resolution of keeping fit and I was no different. It started off just a normal day, I pulled the muscle in my calf and again, didn’t think anything of it. I had started a new job in December, a month before, and my focus was primarily on that. I left it for a couple of months, but the pain was getting worse and worse. I thought to myself, this isn’t normal. The pain was in my calf, it came out as a lump. If you looked at my right calf and my left calf, my left calf just looked enlarged, it was much bigger.”
Eventually, Will made his way to the Glangwili Hospital nearby his hometown, where he visited a doctor, who was reportedly mystified by the pain. “They couldn’t put their finger on what it could be. They thought it could be blood clots and then after that I got put in a boot to kind of protect it more than anything. I was going back and forth for tests until one day a doctor called me and said I needed to come into the hospital.
“After they looked at a photo of my X-Ray, they told me they thought it could be cancer. It came as a big shock, not only for me but for my brother as well,” Will said.
Will was officially diagnosed with Ewing sarcoma, a type of cancer that grows in the bones and is most prevalent in young people, in June 2021. Speaking on the shock of receiving a diagnosis, Will elaborated: “en when I was told that it could be cancer, I had a glimmer of thinking, is this doctor wrong? I’m in my 20s, there’s no way cancer can touch me. But then you realise, it affects everyone. “
After his first diagnosis, Will underwent 14 chemotherapy sessions and 33 radiotherapy sessions, which he said was “intense” at first but soon became “routine” for him.
“It became a part of my life, my routine, I got used to it,” he said. “At the start, it was an initial shock to my body, but my body got used to it and then I got used to it as well. But I was scared about it. It didn’t just affect me but it affected my family and my friends.
“Being a young man in my 20s, I was stripped of all my confidence. I lost my hair, eyebrows and beard through chemotherapy,” he went on. “I would find myself looking in the mirror and wouldn’t recognise the person that was staring back at me. I felt a bit useless and hopeless through it all.”
Whilst he was initially declared cancer-free in March 2022, disaster struck in 2023 when Will noticed a “funny walk in the left leg,” prompting him to seek help with the doctors once again.
After rounds of testing, Will was diagnosed with cerebral metastases – tumour on the head affecting his nervous function – in November 2023.
Further investigation revealed that there was cancer around his right and left shoulders, which made Will feel “like he was back at the start.” 30 radiotherapy sessions were required to treat the cancer.
Currently, he runs an Instagram page called Taith Will, which aims to catalogue his journey and guide other young people experiencing similar struggles.
