Dan’s Story

Imagine a world where traumatic things can happen to people which cause scarring – but it can be undone. No more scars. No more signs of trauma. What difference that would make? 

Owning our story can be hard, but not nearly as hard as living the rest of your life running away from it. My name is Daniel Jackson. My story starts in 2012. I was a normal 34 year old guy, two eyes, symmetrical face, no scars. Life was good. 

Until the day that I got told that I had it, I had never heard of facial cancer. But there it was. Cancer had grown inside my face, behind my eye, behind my nose. It had taken away all the soft tissue that grows behind, pushing against the rear of my eye, making it bulge outwards. The only way to get to the cancer was to go through the eye.  

I was devastated, naturally, to know that I’d be changed forever. It was truly terrifying, to find out I had stage four cancer and then to have to willingly agree to let surgeons take my eye out to access the tumour behind. I just wanted to see my children grow up.

Facial scars, or any sort of scars, are normally caused by a traumatic event, an accident. But when they are caused because you have to choose surgery, choose scarring in order to live, that is really difficult. Your recovery story never really ends, because the scars never go.  

And this is why The Scar Free Foundation is going to change people’s lives. In the future, within a generation, our children will have much better outcomes – no scarring, cell regeneration. It’s incredible. 

Being an object of interest can be hard to deal with. Just raising awareness of scarring and disfigurement would be a major breakthrough. Very often in the media, in films, on TV, disfigured or scarred people are portrayed as ‘scary’. I think it’s time for that to change.

Scar free to me is an incredibly powerful statement. It says that a child might be able to undergo surgery, and then not have to feel sad when they look in the mirror. It says that they’ll be able to have the confidence that any young child should have. I think that’s a beautiful idea.

And that’s why I’m so passionate about working with The Scar Free Foundation. And you should be too.  

Let’s keep going forward. Let’s make the world a better place. Because a life without scars is a dream for some of us. But it can be a reality. So let’s do it.