DJ Edith Bowman lends voice to teen cancer unit appeal

The unit will ensure that teenagers with cancer – described as "a lost tribe" by campaign backers – can be treated alongside other young people in a more informal environment.

Ms Bowman, pictured, who grew up in Anstruther, Fife, and was today set to join campaigners at the Western General for the launch, said:

"Being a teenager is hard enough. Being a teenager and dealing with cancer is another matter.

"The incredible TCT units provide an environment that allows them to be themselves, a home from home with a positive attitude needed to fight cancer. Every teenager in the area who needs access to one of these units should have that right."

The Teenage Cancer Trust first launched its campaign to open two units in the city in 2007.

Thanks in part to the backing of Evening News readers, the first of those units has been opened at the Sick Kids, catering for younger teenagers.

But some of the funds originally intended to provide for a centre at the Western General are now needed to ensure the Sick Kids unit can be replaced when the hospital moves to Little France in 2013. Previously, younger teens complained of being treated around very young children, while those older had no-one within decades of their own age group at the Western.

Prof Tim Eden, medical adviser for the TCT and a patron of the East of Scotland appeal, said: "Teenagers with cancer have been a lost tribe for a long time.

"Their management has often been haphazard. There are huge challenges for any young person during their teenage years.

"Getting a life-threatening condition like cancer on top of this totally disrupts normal life, especially their attempts to become independent adults."

'I felt like I completely lost touch with reality'

ANNA BOYLE was 21, in her final year at art college and preparing for her crowning moment – the end-of-year degree show.

But chest pains that had dogged her for six months, and been dismissed by doctors as a stress-related condition, were eventually blamed on Hodgkin's lymphoma after the Inverleith woman insisted on an X-ray. That was to begin a two-year relationship with the Western General, during which the need for a young people's unit because apparent to Anna.

"Obviously I hated being in hospital," she said. "But the fact that the closest person to my age in there was 45 made it worse – and I only saw them once.

"I felt like I completely lost touch with reality, two years of my life were gone.

If there had been a unit for young people at the hospital it would have made a real difference.

I felt so isolated. The lack of contact with others my own age forced me into a bubble where I couldn't continue my normal life."

Now out of hospital, Anna hopes to stage her degree show in May.