My name is Kyle, and I was born on 10th April 2000. I was just three months old when retinoblastoma changed my life, although at the time I was far too young to understand what was happening.
During my first baby checks, a nurse noticed something different about my eyes, but my parents were told everything was fine. I was also a very distressed baby and cried constantly, apart from when I was in the car. My mum took me to the doctor’s multiple times, but they thought I was simply a baby who cried a lot.
It wasn’t until my parents took a photograph of me and noticed the white glow in my eye that things finally changed. They took me back to the doctors, where I had further checks, and was diagnosed with retinoblastoma.
Thankfully, the cancer was caught in time, and the doctors were able to remove it, but it meant losing my eye at just three months old.
Because I was so young, I don’t actually remember the diagnosis, the treatment or losing my eye. Everything I know about those first few months comes from the stories my mum and dad have told me over the years. They are the people who remember what happened and what they went through, and their memories have become part of my story too.
Growing up different
I have never known life with two eyes. For me, having one eye has always just been part of who I am. But growing up, I didn’t always feel that way.
When I was very young, I didn’t really understand why I was different. As I got older, though, I started to notice how other people reacted to me.
At my first primary school, I had grown up with many of the same children from a young age, so nobody really thought much about the fact that I had one eye.
That changed when my parents moved me to another primary school.
I started Year 4 as the new kid, and I immediately stood out. I was different from everyone else, and unfortunately, that made me a target.
The bullying wasn’t just name-calling. It could become physical too.
Even on my first day at my second primary school, I experienced bullying. I was pushed around and physically picked on, as well as being called horrible names such as “freak”, “pirate”, “alien” and even Mike Wazowski from Monsters, Inc., along with many others.
At that age, I didn’t always understand why people were treating me that way or why having one eye made me such a target.
It really affected me.
I felt unwanted and isolated, and school became somewhere I didn’t want to be. Eventually, I left that school after a year and went somewhere else. Unfortunately, some of the same things happened there too.
By that point, I had heard most of it before, so I had become used to it. Thankfully, I also made some really good friends who helped me through those years.
Secondary school brought another challenge. There were even more people, and I constantly felt like I had to explain myself. I never knew how someone was going to react when they noticed my eye.
It wasn’t just the bullying that affected me. I became very self-conscious.
I struggled with confidence and found it difficult to maintain eye contact with people. I would constantly wonder, “Are they looking at my artificial eye?”
That thought could be in the back of my mind whenever I was talking to someone.
As I got older, those worries didn’t disappear. They even came into my relationships and dating life. When you’re trying to meet someone romantically, you naturally worry about whether they are going to accept you and whether your eye is going to be something they notice or judge you for.
For a long time, I carried those worries around with me.
“Why me?”
When I was younger, I often asked myself, “Why me?”
I would think it when I was being bullied. I would think it when I was having a bad day. I would think it when there was something I couldn’t do because of having one eye.
I spent a lot of time focusing on what I couldn’t do rather than what I could.
But as I got older, something changed.
I started to realise that I couldn’t change what had happened to me. I couldn’t change the fact that I had lost my eye as a baby.
But I could choose what I did with my life.
I started thinking: “What if this is just who I am? If this is the person I’m meant to be, why shouldn’t I try to become the best version of myself that I can be?”
That was a huge turning point for me.
I started learning to embrace the thing I had spent years trying to hide.
Finding myself through sport
After leaving school, I went to college and discovered a passion for sport.
I played futsal and learned about football coaching, physiotherapy, the human body and how it works in sport. I started coaching football and realised how much I enjoyed helping other people.
But my journey didn’t stop there.
After college, I moved between different jobs, trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. Then I was given an opportunity to help coach martial arts.
I started by helping with the children’s classes, using the experience I had gained from football coaching.
At the same time, I started training myself.
Martial arts became much more than just exercise for me.
It helped me build confidence. It taught me discipline. It taught me that I could push myself and do things that I had once believed weren’t possible.
I had spent so much of my childhood being made to feel like I was different or that there were things I couldn’t do.
Now I was doing something that demanded confidence, determination and resilience.
And I loved it.
Four years later, I’ve had four kickboxing fights, with my fifth coming soon. I’ve coached and cornered fighters on bigger stages, helped people prepare for fights, and I’m now a head kickboxing coach at my gym.
I teach children’s classes, self-defence, cardio and kickboxing, and I also work with my local college on different projects.
Looking back, it’s strange to think that the child who struggled so much with confidence and being different would one day stand in front of a room full of people and teach them.
But that’s exactly what happened.
Learning to accept myself
I don’t think accepting myself happened overnight.
For years, I worried about what people thought of me. I worried about my artificial eye. I worried about eye contact. I worried about dating and whether someone would accept me.
But eventually, I realised that constantly worrying about what other people might think was holding me back more than my eye ever did.
My eye is part of my story.
It doesn’t have to be something I hide.
It doesn’t stop me from being a coach. It doesn’t stop me from competing. It doesn’t stop me from helping people. And it doesn’t stop me from being myself.
I’ve learned that I don’t need to be defined by the things that happened to me.
I can acknowledge them, learn from them and still decide what kind of person I want to become.
Becoming a dad
Now, another chapter of my life is beginning because I’m expecting a child.
Becoming a dad is something I’m incredibly excited about, but it also brings a different kind of worry.
Because of my own experience with retinoblastoma, there is a part of me that worries about my future son going through what I went through.
Because I was diagnosed so young, I know that a child doesn’t understand what’s happening to them in the way an adult does. I also know what it can be like growing up afterwards and having to deal with the emotional side of being different.
There are moments when I think about what it would be like if my son ever had to go through something similar.
That thought is frightening, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to completely switch that worry off.
But I’ve also learned something throughout my life: you can’t spend your life being controlled by fear of something that might happen.
If that day ever comes, I will deal with it the best way I possibly can. I will be there for him. I will understand more than most what he might be feeling, and I will make sure he knows that having retinoblastoma or losing an eye will never stop him from being who he wants to be.
And hopefully, he will grow up in a world where he never has to experience the bullying and lack of understanding that I did.
What I want other people to know
If there is one message I want people to take from my story, it is this:
Don’t let anyone tell you what you can and can’t do.
For a long time, I focused on the things I thought I couldn’t do because I had one eye.
I was made to feel that certain sports weren’t possible for me.
Now I’m coaching, competing, teaching and helping other people.
My life hasn’t always been easy, and I’m not going to pretend that accepting myself happened quickly. I still have worries and insecurities sometimes. But I’ve learned that being different doesn’t mean you have to live a smaller life.
If you’re a child who has retinoblastoma, has lost an eye, wears an artificial eye or is struggling with how different you feel, I hope my story shows you that your diagnosis is only one part of who you are.
And if you’re a parent whose child is going through retinoblastoma, I hope my story can give you some hope about the person they can become.
I was once the baby who lost an eye at three months old.
I was the kid who hated school, struggled with confidence and wondered why this had happened to me.
Now I’m a kickboxing coach, a competitor, a person who helps others, and soon I’ll be a dad.
I can’t change the beginning of my story.
But I can choose what I do with the rest of it.
And that’s what I intend to do.