I STILL MISS MY MOTHER EVERY DAY
The Only Fools And Horses star talks to ROZ LEWIS about her mum’s battle with ovarian cancer
IF Gwyneth Strong’s beloved mother Mair had survived her battle with ovarian cancer she would now be in her 80s. “Although I’m a grandmother myself, I still miss my mum every day and so wish she was still with us to share big family moments,” says Gwyneth, 58, who is still best known for her role as the long-suffering Cassandra in BBC sitcom Only Fools And Horses.
“I’m sure she would have been proud to watch my daughter Lottie, who is now 27, graduate from Cambridge University, and my son Oscar, who is 30 now and father to one-year-old twin boys.”
It will be 20 years this summer since Gwyneth’s mum, who was 63 at the time and working as a secretary at the BBC, first began to complain about feeling tired. But her eventual diagnosis, many months later, came as a huge shock for the family, who had never heard of the disease which claims the lives of more than 4,000 women in the UK every year.
“I was working in a play at the Hampstead Theatre at the time,” explains Gwyneth, who is married to fellow actor Jesse Birdsall, 55, and lives in Bexhill, East Sussex. “I remember my mum had been ill for some time. She’d had a variety of symptoms and had been back and forth to her doctor for tests. She’d been getting lower back pain on and off, had been very tired and had been complaining of having a bloated stomach.
“One day she was in so much pain that she was having difficulty standing up so I decided I had to take her to A&E. When we got there she had to be operated on that night. Afterwards we were told she had ovarian cancer which I knew nothing about.
“It was a terrible shock to my younger two sisters (Catrin and Elian) too,” says Gwyneth. “My mum was a very strong woman, a very loving mother and we were all close. The diagnosis was grim; she was given only 18 months to live.
“The doctors continued to treat her and she had further surgery and two cycles of chemotherapy. We made a point of always spending as much time with her as we could and trying to have some good moments together when she wasn’t having treatment or feeling too unwell.”
Sadly Mair passed away in 2000.
OVARIAN cancer is the deadliest gynaecological cancer and the UK has one of the lowest survival rates in western Europe. About 7,400 women are diagnosed each year but 60 per cent of cases are not discovered until it has advanced to stage three. The chances of surviving the disease fall from 90 per cent if caught at stage one, to as low as five per cent by stage four, when the cancer has spread throughout the body.
The odds are stacked against women who are diagnosed with the disease, according to the charity Ovarian Cancer Action. Recurrence is high and survival rates are poor.
This bleak prognosis is partly due to the fact that women with ovarian cancer often have vague and fairly mild symptoms such as persistent stomach pain, bloating, difficulty eating and needing to urinate more frequently, which are often mistaken for other conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome.
Unfortunately diagnosis and treatment are often delayed because GPs aren’t fully aware of the symptoms.
Treatment options for the disease include surgery and chemotherapy. Jo Stanford, of Ovarian Cancer Action, says: “The key to treating ovarian cancer is personalising treatment, which is why it’s vital that all women diagnosed with ovarian cancer are offered genetic testing. BRCA (breast cancer) gene mutation carriers do better on standard platinum chemotherapy treatments and tend to have longer periods of time between the disease recurring, than women with non-hereditary ovarian cancer.”
In 2016 a drug called Olaparib was approved for women with BRCA gene mutations facing a second recurrence of ovarian cancer. This new class of drug, known as a PARP inhibitor, can delay the progression of the disease by up to two years. Another treatment in the pipeline is immunotherapy but this is not available to UK patients.
To improve survival rates, Ovarian Cancer Action now wants to develop a screening tool that will detect pre-cancerous cells which can be treated before they develop into ovarian cancer, a move which Gwyneth, a patron of the charity for the past 11 years, describes as “a very big step forward”.
A team of scientists at the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine at the University of Oxford, led by Professor Ahmed Ashour Ahmed, recently made a breakthrough with the discovery of a protein called SOX2 that is more prevalent in women with ovarian cancer or in those who have a genetic propensity to the disease.
It is hoped that this protein has the potential to be used as a biomarker in a screening tool. The team also want to be able to track the process from normal, healthy cells into ovarian cancer tumours.
Gwyneth, who was last on our TV screens in 2016 as pub landlady Geraldine Clough in East Enders, takes her own health seriously as a result of her family’s experience.
She keeps fit by taking a Bodyshock Fitness class outdoors twice a week. “I try to eat as healthily as I can and limit how much red meat and alcohol I have. I do my best with my fruit and vegetable intake too.”
She adds: “You are always aware of cancer if you have lost a very close relative to it but I try not to let it affect me. I try to do what my mother would have wanted – which is to get on with my life and to enjoy it as best as I can.”
Gwyneth Strong is a patron of Ovarian Cancer Action. To donate visit ovarian.org.uk or Text OVCA12 plus the amount you would like to donate to 70070.
‘I try to get on with my life and to enjoy it’