By Isle of Wight Observer
My sister, Zoe Panayi, lost her battle with cancer on May 29, 2020, at the young age of 26, leaving behind two young boys, friends and a loving family.
Things could have been so different for Zoe, but she was let down substantially by both GPs and beauticians, and we want to change the law.
There isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t wake up and think about my sister, with sadness, guilt and ‘what ifs’, along with the frustration of getting the necessary 100,000 signatures that we need to take our campaign to parliament. So I decided to take on 12 huge challenges in memory of my sister, to help raise awareness of our campaign, whilst also raising money for the Mountbatten hospice and Wight Brainy Bunch on the Isle of Wight.
I have already taken on summiting Mt Kilimanjaro, Mt Etna, the half-marathon Abdominal Snowman, National 3 Peaks, a 75 1/2 mile bike ride, Walk The Wight, two sea swims over the festive period, Go Ape (and I hate heights!), a charity football match and the London Tough Mudder.
As you can imagine, summiting Kilimanjaro is an extremely hard task and pushed me to my mental and physical peak; at points I was wondering whether I could actually finish it. When I got to the summit emotions took over and I couldn’t stop crying for around 30 minutes.
The next hardest task to date has definitely been the 75 1/2 mile bike ride, until that morning I had never sat on a road bike, let alone ridden one, worn cleats etc. Around the 20-mile mark I hit a wall (not literally) and genuinely wondered how I could possibly finish another 55+ miles. But in my head, I imagined the day I watched Zoe die. This was easily the worst thing I am likely to ever see in my life; she tried so hard to live and just couldn’t win the battle. When I thought of this I felt ‘finishing this bike ride is easy’…and I did it in 5 hours and 47 minutes (only falling off once).
The only event I have left is reaching Everest base camp, which I set off to do on March 1.
I want to make a difference for my sister and try and avoid what happened to her happening to anyone else and your support would be greatly appreciated.
If you Google ‘12 challenges in 10 months in memory of Zoe Panayi’ you will be able to find the link to support my efforts. You can find details of Zoe’s story at iow.life/zoe, where you can watch a short documentary of what happened to her which tells the story so much better than I can.
Please support me where you can and sign the petition which you can reach via iow.life/zoe.
