Hazel King was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia in October 2014. AML. Not just any category — the third and worst chromosomal category. The one where the odds are firmly stacked against survival.
She was admitted to St Bartholomew's Hospital in the City of London, one of the UK's major cancer centres. At her age, the doctors were honest: there was only a slim chance she would survive.
The First Round
The first round of chemotherapy failed.
That sentence is easy to read and impossible to live through. Chemotherapy is brutal enough when it works. When it does not, you are left weakened, poisoned, and facing the same cancer that was there before — except now you have fewer options.
The doctors moved to stronger treatment. A more aggressive regimen. And then a bone marrow transplant — one of the most gruelling procedures in oncology, where they effectively destroy your immune system and replace it with someone else's.
Hazel spent five months in hospital.
The Church
Back in East London, Hazel's small church community was praying. Not the kind of praying that happens once on a Sunday morning and then gets forgotten. The persistent, daily, stubborn kind of praying that refuses to stop even when the news gets worse.
Hazel herself held a posture that surprised even her medical team. She described herself as being "in God's hands for whichever" — meaning she had genuinely surrendered the outcome. She was at peace with living. She was at peace with dying. She trusted God with both.
That is not denial. That is not giving up. That is the kind of faith that only comes when you have exhausted every other option and landed on the only solid ground that exists: the goodness of God regardless of circumstance.
The Cure
Hazel survived the transplant. She survived the recovery. She survived the years of monitoring and waiting and wondering.
In 2020, five years after treatment, she received the word that every cancer patient longs to hear: cured. Not in remission. Cured. Five years clear means the medical profession considers you no longer at elevated risk. The leukaemia was gone.
Hazel went on to write a book about her experience — Leukaemia: Dispatches from the Front — published to help others walking the same road.
What This Means for You
Hazel King's story is not one of instant miraculous healing. It is a story of endurance — of a body pushed to its limit by medicine, and a spirit held together by faith and community.
If your healing is taking longer than you thought, if the treatment is harder than you imagined, if you are in the middle of something that feels like it will never end — Hazel's story says: keep going. God is not absent in the long fight. He is present in every transfusion, every prayer, every sleepless hospital night.
And sometimes, on the other side of five years of fighting, the word you hear is: cured.
