Jeff Freestone is a proud Melbournian, a father of two and a passionate football fan.

On the surface, he is like any one of us; he bleeds his club colours, albethey the red, white and blue of the Western Bulldogs, and he loves his wife and two daughters.

But three months ago, Jeff was diagnosed with aplastic anaemia.

WATCH: Jeff Freestone’s story

The story of his diagnosis is a harrowing one, not because of its severity or its drama, but perhaps more disturbingly, because of its eerie normality.

“It was probably a week before I went in and saw the doctor,” explained Jeff, who’d just relocated 5 hours from Melbourne with his young family to Omeo, a small town in the beautiful high country of Victoria.

“I was feeling pretty tired … I was taking my daughter for a few walks around and noticed I was really struggling just getting her up the hill.

“When I got back (home) I was feeling it in the chest, and throughout that week, I just started to feel quite light-headed. When I was working I couldn’t concentrate, and I thought it might have been just a cold of some sort.”

READ: Maddie's Vision's profound impact

Unfortunately, the severity of Jeff’s illness was soon revealed to be much more serious than that.

“I didn’t really think about it too much, and then the next day, the doctor just closed the door and said, ‘I don’t know how to tell you this, but I think you’ve got leukaemia’,” he said.

“I didn’t know the severity of it and what it meant, but the doctor said that I had to get down to Melbourne as soon as possible.”

Jeff was then admitted to the emergency ward at the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, where he underwent a series of tests over a two-week period to ascertain an exact diagnosis and assess its severity.

The initial diagnosis of leukaemia was proven to be false, but what awaited Jeff was something potentially even more deadly: a bone marrow failure syndrome called aplastic anaemia.

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“The thing with aplastic anaemia, because it doesn’t have that ‘cancer’ label behind it, it doesn’t seem as serious, but in some ways, it can be,” Jeff said.

“Most people don’t know what it is … so I think getting that awareness, getting the funds for research and those sorts of things into new treatments is great.”

Bone marrow failure syndromes have less than a 50% survival rate, so Jeff’s ability to be treated for this horrific disease relies heavily on the continued research and development undertaken by Maddie Riewoldt’s Vision.

You can support this under-represented cause by attending Maddie's Match at Etihad Stadium at 7:50pm on Friday 20 July to watch the Saints take on the Tigers.