As always thank you so much for all your support. This petition belongs to all of you; the people who have taken the time to sign, share and promote its message.

Julie Marson, our MP, has diligently promoted this petition and campaign. She has spoken about Jess twice in parliament. Once outlining the case for Jess’ Law. On both occasions, the ministers responding, whilst sympathetic, have highlighted how rare Jessica’s cancer was. Jess was 27. So today I ask are we meant to say, “Fair enough, that’s okay if it was rare ?”

It was a comment made by Sacha, an inspirational campaigner who works tirelessly to highlight symptom awareness for brain tumours in children, that inspired me to write this next part.

Perhaps an appropriate response to the “it’s rare” argument is to say if the average life expectancy of a female in the UK is 83 years old then Jess missed 56 years of life. If another cancer patient died at 72 (still relatively young) they would miss out on 11 years of living. Jess missed out on more than 5 times that amount. So, we could say Jess being ignored and misdiagnosed amounted to the same number of lost years as 5 older patients. That’s 5. When one considers that 10% of all cancers diagnosed fall in the 25 - 49 age bracket that is a considerable loss of potential and consequential heartache. This is without factoring in the monumental loss of life in the under 25’s (dying at 5 is equal to 7 times the loss of years of a 72-year-old) I’d say that is worth caring about. Let’s stop calling cancer in young people rare and start calculating how many lost years. Let’s consider the devastation. The cataclysmic impact.

This has to become a priority regardless of the financial crisis.

Please continue to support increasing the awareness and diagnosis of cancer for ALL.