Author(s): Peta Margetts

General

Being Peta provides a brave, honest firsthand account by a young person of what it's like to live with leukaemia. It is a book that will provide comfort and companionship to sufferers and their loved ones. In the world of cancer, teenagers are renowned for not articulating their feelings about living with their illness. But sixteen-year-old Peta Margetts was brave enough to do that: with a wonderful sense of humour as well as an ability to put all of the upheaval into perspective, Peta reflects on the positives amid a regime of chemotherapy. Her rawness and honesty are complemented by her wit and vivacity as she confronts the possibilities that she may die. In Being Peta, she relives her battle with leukaemia after her initial diagnosis. Her reflections illuminate the tedium that hospital life brings and how all of the medical procedures around her were secondary to everything else around her: school, friends, work and, above all, family. While the focus of the book is Peta's own writing, her mother, Leonie, completes the story through her account of events.
Also included in Being Peta are letters from family and friends on how they have been affected by the death of a young girl who was so important to so many people. "Neither of us really believed what we were being told. It wasn't the end of the treatment, but we had no doubt of the gravity of our situation. [...] We went into another room, where we sat and tried to digest the news. Peta grabbed my hand, looked into my eyes and firmly said, 'I just think there are worse things in the world than a seventeen-year-old girl dying!' "