Nomad family who’s fighting cancer!
Who are we?
We’re a family of 4, who decided to sell everything we own to go live in a van and travel Europe. It’s me; Malin, Tom and our two kids Isabella (2) and Charlie (4) and we live full time in our Fiat Ducato. Why did we take the step to sell everything?
In October 2022, not even three weeks after my 29th birthday I got a cancer diagnosis, I had colon cancer. I had a 10 cm aggressive tumour growing inside of me. The real world stopped and we lived in the world of cancer for over a year. We had a three year old and a one year old to care for at the same time as we were dealing with some of the hardest cards you can be given. I had been poorly for a while before I got the diagnosis, for about 6 months I had been trying to get help from different kind of doctors but because I was a young woman who only 6 months earlier had a baby the problems was not taken seriously. In the end I managed to get an appointment in the hospital where they straight away said it didn’t look good. In November 2022 I started radiotherapy. In December I started chemo and in April I had a big surgery. I also managed to cram in an emergency surgery in March due to ileus, where I also got my colostomy. So it was an eventful year!
What I haven’t said is that about 5 days before I got my diagnosis we bought a new van. Our dream van that we’d been looking for, for probably years. We took the train down to the south of Sweden to pick up this beauty and we had so many plans and dreams for her! But we didn’t even get one weekend with her before we realised how sick I was. But she was the sunshine in our darkness, she saved us from going to deep into that darkest space that comes over you during cancer. Every weekend I managed to get out of bed we spent in the van, even if it was only on my parents garden. Tom and my dad fixed her up so we could take her out properly. This van saved us, it really did. Therefor we’ve named her ‘Sunny’.
When we first bought the van, the plan wasn’t to live full time in it, but after the year that we had the dream became bigger and bigger to only live in the van and start travelling. So after the summer when I had recovered mostly from the surgery we decided to sell the house and managed to find a woman who wanted to move in ASAP. So 6 weeks after we signed the papers we moved out of our house and in to our van! Now, a few months later we’re parked up next to a beach in Tenerife, enjoying the sunshine and the free life of travelling!
