Meet the 'endfluencers' challenging the terminal illness stigma

Designed to educate younger audiences on the often-overlooked topic of end of life, the film shows three endfluencers going about their daily routines while revealing why they chose to share their stories online.

I started having really severe symptoms that would wake me up in the middle of the night, and then I started having trouble with my vision. I had a CT scan and they told me the news that there was a mass in my brain.

That was the first time I heard the words ‘tumour’ and ‘cancer’. It was all happening very quickly like an out-of-body experience. We had a follow-up appointment and I was told that I'd have about 15 years left to live. That was the first time it really hit me that I was one of the unlucky ones whose life would be cut short by cancer.

To offer other people hope and make them feel less alone, I started sharing my journey. I'd make content about the kind of struggles that I've lived with and overcome in the past.

I think it's important for young people to know that it's not game over straight away. It may not be the life that you envisioned or hoped for, but you do learn to adapt. I do have a future; I have so much more to do, so much more love to give and to receive. You can still live a life.

The hardest thing I've come across in my journey has been people's opinions. People have very preconceived ideas about what being disabled looks like, what being a female looks like, and what living with a life-limiting condition is. Making the decision to pursue end of life treatment was one of the hardest things I’ve had to face, but it has also been one of the most liberating decisions.

I'm actually the most unnatural person on social media, but I do it because I didn't see anybody like me out there. I hope by sharing my story, maybe someone will feel slightly less alone when they might face something similar. I want to show that there is more to terminal illness than simply dying.

I found sailing when I was 13 and I haven't stopped since. From that first day on the water, sailing gave me pure freedom. End of life care just means you're prioritising quality of life over quantity of life. It was about everything from making me comfortable to ensuring I could chase dreams, whatever I wanted and for me to go sailing, be at home and spend a lot of time with my dog. The decision I made was I would plan as if I have forever but live as if I have today.

Five years ago I was teaching fitness classes and starting a little social media channel. To fill in the rest of the wallet I would do medical trials. By freakish luck I was doing an MRI for my head and within that they were able to discover that I had what was titled as a benign tumour.

When I had my second scan, they told me this is growing, this is not benign, this is going to require surgery and that's where it all started. I never focused too much on the actual cancer itself; it was just how can I get around these other problems that I'm gonna face.

I just made the switch to my social media channel being about raising money for charity. That is now my entire life's purpose, my only life goal. The actual thing that matters to me is to break the charity world record for raising the most amount of money ever for running a marathon — it's not to have followers.

My life has a lot of meaning now but in a lot of ways that is not because of getting cancer, it's more because of the opportunity that getting cancer has presented me with. What I would like other people to understand is that not everybody deals with death in the same way.

You can watch the full mini documentary below or on YouTube.