Over the last month, one name has been all over the news: Stephen Sutton. If you don’t know his amazing story already, here’s a short summary.
Stephen Sutton was first diagnosed with cancer at the age of 15. Just a normal teenage boy, he participated in school sports and played the drums in a local band; he had aspirations of becoming a doctor. After the diagnosis of colorectal cancer, he had to have surgery to remove a tumour from his bowel before beginning months of crippling chemotherapy. Stephen thankfully went into remission, only for his cancer to return in under a year. Despite ongoing treatments, Stephen’s cancer has continued to spread and is now incurable. But rather than resign himself to a life of hospital appointments and intrusive treatments, Stephen decided to embrace life and make a difference. He created a bucket list of things he wanted to do before he passed, one of those things included raising £1 million for the Teenage Cancer Trust. Stephen went about completing the goals on his bucket list including: getting a tattoo, writing a book, breaking a world record and skydiving; all while raising money for charity along the way. Celebrities including Jason Manford became aware of Stephen and his campaign, and it has since gone viral. With donations flooding in to help support Stephen, he has now raised over £3 million pounds.
Truly inspirational, Stephen’s actions are nothing short of incredible considering the illness that only deteriorates his health everyday. You would think that the reaction to his efforts would be commendation and congratulations. Yet, some have taken it upon themselves to criticise and even mock Stephen and his illness. Users on social media websites such as Twitter have slammed his story due to a recent bout of good health, asking for donation refunds and questioning the legitimacy of his illness. Shockingly Stephen even apologised on his Twitter account for the fact that he was still alive!
This phenomenon is known as Internet Trolling and sadly, it is nothing new. In the last few decades, anonymous users and even those ignorant enough to use their real names have posted abusive and mocking messages to memorial sites, personal Facebook profiles and campaign pages such as Stephen’s. Despite trolling occurring almost everyday on multiple internet forums, very little legal action has been taken against those that post such hateful messages. It seems bizarre that anyone would wish to increase the misery of others through hurtful or disrespectful messages, but unfortunately this is the case. While there is a not lot that we can do to stop these cowardly bullies from posting on Stephen’s story from behind the safety of their keyboards, we can continue to support Stephen and overcome the negativity of Internet Trolls.
If you want to read more about Stephen’s story and follow his progress then check out his Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/StephensStory
Photo Credits: www.dailymail.co.uk, www.ebay.co.uk