“Just relax, take it easy, and remember you need to focus on yourself. If you’re negative, I feel like that will go against you so much. Be positive, get into the passenger seat and let the team who are treating you guide you.”
Dean Redmond, 30, from Dublin, was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) in April 2025, several months after he first discovered a lump just below his jaw. He first noticed it in December 2024 and initially didn’t realise how big it was because his beard obscured it.
“I didn’t realise how big the mass was because my beard covered it,” he says. “I’d tell people about it, and they kept saying they thought it was just a cyst. It was right under my jaw, and it wasn’t that sore. I’m a tattoo artist, so when I’m tattooing, I’m completely focused on that, and that was the only real time when I noticed a dull pain where the lump was.”
In March 2025, Dean decided to shorten his beard so he could see how big the lump was and realised it had grown. Shortly afterwards, he had a wisdom tooth infection on the side where the lump was. After his wisdom tooth was extracted, he experienced swelling that didn’t subside.
“I went back to the dentist three weeks after the extraction and told him about it and he was surprised,” says Dean. “He said it shouldn’t still be swollen. So I went to doctors, I got bloods, scans and ultrasounds and nothing showed up on them.
“In April, I decided to go to the Hermitage and paid to see a maxillofacial specialist to see if he could figure out what was happening. He said straight away that something wasn’t right, and I had to come back in the next day for the lump to be biopsied. I was really frustrated at that point, because before that I kept being told there was nothing wrong, nothing was showing up in the tests I’d done. But he was on the ball immediately.”
Despite progress on treatment, his finances were suffering
On the 22nd of April 2025, Dean was diagnosed with AML, which came as a shock.
“Straight away, when you hear the word ‘cancer’, you just think you’re going to die,” he says. “But the hospital staff did put me at ease.
“When I was first told, I was in bits, but that evening I had a meeting with my doctor and specialist nurse, and they told me what the plan was. They said my cancer was treatable and it had been caught early. That was great, it’s the best thing you can hear after being diagnosed with cancer.”
Dean’s treatment consisted of four rounds of chemotherapy, spread across seven months. After his first round, he received good news.
“I went into remission straight away,” he says. “When they did the bone marrow biopsy and spinal tap, they found I had 0.3% cancer.”
While Dean’s treatment was going well, the self-employed tattoo studio owner struggled with the financial implications of his diagnosis.
“Being self-employed, I didn’t get anything off the Government for a while, until I was half-way through treatment,” he says. “I got a medical card, but it took a long time for it to come through.
“My fiancé, Hayley McDonald, had just finished college so she had no money coming in, and I have a tattoo shop and the bills for the shop never stop, and we have a three-year-old daughter, Cadhla, too. The financial toll was nearly the hardest part.
“My team in the tattoo studio did a fundraiser for me. They set up a Go Fund Me and did a tattoo day for me. That helped me massively, they raised nearly €8,000. I wasn’t able to work at all when I was going through treatment – I’m hoping to go back to work in January – so the money raised has helped to pay my bills and the rates for shop. So at least the pressure to pay those bills is off me now.”
When he was more than halfway through his treatment, Dean picked up some Irish Cancer Society cancer information booklets from the Daffodil Centre. He found them to be a useful source of information and advice.
“They were very helpful,” he says. “I only read them after I had my third round of chemo, but it was nice to be able to read them and get an understanding of what was happening, and especially about things like fatigue.”
Dean finished his treatment in October 2025 and is now doing well. He advises anyone who notices changes in their body to get them checked out and be persistent.
“Always investigate if you have anything that’s concerning you,” he says. “Get it checked. If I had left it, the mass probably would’ve grown to a much worse stage. But I kept pushing it until I got an answer – that saved my life.”
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