Friends pay tribute to their 23 year old colleague who died from bowel cancer
Friday 11 November 2022
Matt Rainsford is raising awareness of Darren Forrest’s story who passed away from bowel cancer aged 23, and the fundraising in memory of him on behalf of his friends and ex-colleagues at AECOM. This blog includes some extracts and information from Darren’s Instagram account with his thoughts and words.
Darren or Dazza as he was known to some at work, was our friend and colleague who sadly passed away on the 16th November last year. He was fun, lived life to the full but was also very focused on work and being a proud part of the LGBTQ+ community within the West Midlands and AECOM. He was a very confident and intelligent person who was driven for success and this was proved by being moved up years at school.
He was known to many as someone who wouldn’t just let things be and always wanted to improve and progress, challenging old methods and always looking to make them better. Outside of work he couldn’t have been any different with a full and active social life and always up for a drink or two, even if he did frequently knock them over.
Darren grew up in a small village near Aberdeen before his big adventure to Dubai in 2017. Once completing his degree he started as a graduate transport planner at the AECOM Birmingham office in West Midlands (Dubai and Birmingham are similar right?). While in Birmingham and the West Midlands, Darren soon settled in and was starting to make his new adopted city his home.
After only one year in the office, COVID hit and working from home became the norm. That didn’t stop or halt him however and he achieved a master's degree from Edinburgh Napier while studying online and working full-time. Once all of these challenges were overcome, Darren was readying himself for the next part of his career with a new job at City Science.
In October 2021, Darren attended a colleague's birthday night out and that was when we heard for the first that he had been unwell. He mentioned that he had been having stomach and back aches and that the doctors had recommended changing his diet. For many of us that were sadly the last time we ever got to see Darren.
He had arranged to catch up and meet his friend Rebecca Bettison at the Highways UK event in Birmingham on the 3rd November for a networking opportunity. However, the discomfort for Darren had got so bad that he wasn’t able to attend the event and he instead visited his local GP. This was where they discovered high infection levels in his blood and was sent straight to the hospital. While there he was subsequently diagnosed with stage 4 bowel cancer.
After receiving the devastating news, Darren didn’t sit and dwell and wallow on the diagnosis, he immediately set up a JustGiving page from his hospital bed to raise funds for Bowel Cancer UK and to raise awareness of this disease in young people. In Darren’s words “much more needs to be done to support the early diagnosis of younger bowel cancer patients”. After only setting out to raise £1,000, the generosity of his friends and the public ensured he well surpassed that raising a massive £10,000.
On 15th November, just six days after receiving his diagnosis, Darren passed away back in his hometown in Aberdeen surrounded by his family. I’ll never forget the moment I personally found out the news, I was sitting at work and his close friend Rebecca Bettison told the team on a video call about Darren's diagnosis. How do you carry on working after finding that out? The next few hours and days were hard for many of us to comprehend what had happened. I won’t pretend that I was as close to Darren as others were, but at just 23 years old when he passed away, it’s fair to say that it has affected me and continues to affect us all.
A lot of us see dreadfully sad stories in the news or on charity fundraising TV shows and always assume that it wouldn’t happen to anyone that we know. Darren certainly thought the same in the days before passing, writing “it’s all happened so quickly, I never imagined it would happen to me”. And that’s perhaps why it has hit many of us particularly hard.
But having said that, Darren didn’t wallow and he wouldn’t have wanted us to either, so this is why on 24th September 2022 we decided to undertake our own fundraising challenge. After coming up with several crazy and ambitious ideas, we finally settled on walking the canal from Wolverhampton to Birmingham. Since moving to the Venice of the Midlands (Birmingham) Darren enjoyed walks within his local area and that’s where our inspiration came from.
On a pleasant September day, seven of his ex-colleagues took on the challenge in good spirits starting from Wolverhampton train station at 10am. After stopping for a lunch break halfway through and ploughing on through a rain shower, we reached a packed Birmingham at 3:30pm. We swiftly headed to the pub to rest our legs and raise a glass to Darren. It was rather fitting that the sun was shining, it was Pride weekend in Birmingham and also World Cancer Research Day.
A massive thank you to everyone who took part and supported us either through generous donations or just kind words. In total, we have raised £610 with further fundraising events to be planned by AECOM in the future.
I want to leave everyone reading with a quote from Darren himself. “I dream of a world where early diagnosis is key and no one needs to die from cancer”.
One day we will get there.
