My name is Georgia, I am 18 years old and I am a Young Ambassador with Caring Matters Now. I am excited to be a part of the team and to be able to help younger people affected by CMN and to gain new skills and confidence.
I was born with bathing trunk CMN and hundreds of satellite moles all over my body, I also have them on my brain, but I have no neurological problems.
Before turning two years old, I had several operations at Great Ormand Street Hospital in London to remove lumps from my arms, legs, and hips. Just four years ago, I had more surgery on my hip due to the regrowth of one of the lumps.
From the age of 8 I started attending Caring Matters Now Support Days, conferences and activity weekends. I really enjoyed these events, I felt ‘normal’ because everybody was like me. I have been to every CMN weekend since 2013! Once we travelled down on the Friday and had to leave on the Saturday night as I was part of a supporting dance act for Ray Quinn at the Skegness light switch on, I wanted to be at the activity weekend so much that we returned that same night!
I have made some very close friends, we’re still close to this day! We love it when we can finally get together at the Teen Support Days or PGL weekends… it’s like we were never apart because we all get along so well! Due to the recent global pandemic, the conferences and activity weekends have been cancelled so we have been communicating through Zoom meetings and quizzes. I miss seeing my friends face to face, it was great to be able to see some of them as we climbed the O2 arena together as part of the Young Ambassadors Program in November 2021! I was proud to be able to raise sponsorship money from doing the O2 climb to help fund the research and it was a brilliant opportunity to do something new that I probably wouldn’t of done on my own. We went for something to eat afterwards with some of my friends and I got to meet some new teenagers as well!
Amongst all of the great experiences I have had with the charity, I am very grateful that I had the chance to be photographed by the wonderful photographer Brock Elbank for the exhibition How Do You C Me Now. I was one of the 30 people chosen for the exhibition and I was lucky enough to meet a lot of the other CMN models on the opening night at the OXO Tower Wharf Art gallery in London. I received a copy of my portrait as a thank you of taking part, the photographs from the exhibition have now been made into a hardback book to celebrate the beauty and lives of CMN and has been in an online exhibition too. It felt amazing to be chosen and included in the exhibition and I had a lot of fun visiting the exhibition with my family.
