Surviving cancer makes you reassess your life
The singer tells ELIZABETH ARCHER why she is lending her voice to a campaign to teach sign language in schools
AS BUCKS FIZZ star Jay Aston stood in a recording studio belting out the final notes of a new song, tears streamed from her eyes. When she glanced at band mates Cheryl Baker and Mike Nolan, they too were sobbing.
Earlier that day, Jay had been diagnosed with mouth cancer.
The song’s title, Here To Eternity, seemed especially poignant.
“It felt ominous that I was singing that song on that day,” says Jay, who lives in Kent with husband Dave Colquhoun and their 16-yearold daughter Josie.
“It’s about leaving someone or spending the rest of your life with someone. It was very emotional and we were all crying at the end.”
Now, 18 months on, the song is due to be released on The Fizz’s new album, Smoke And Mirrors (they rebranded after Bobby G left), and Jay is cancer-free.
“Surviving cancer really makes you re-evaluate your life,” she says.
Following her treatment, which left her unable to speak at times, Jay is keen to raise awareness of the importance of being able to communicate.
WHEN she was in hospital after surgery to remove the tumour, she was mute for 10 days.
“For the first 10 days after my operation, I had to write everything on a whiteboard and it made me realise how important it is to be able to communicate,” she says.
Now she has joined calls for Makaton – a language combining signs and sounds designed to help the hearing communicate with the deaf – to be taught in schools.
When Here To Eternity is released on March 6, the video will feature signing from Isabella Signs, a YouTube star who learnt sign language to communicate with her younger brother Lucas, who has Down’s Syndrome.
“The song is magical and I hope it connects to people,” says Jay.
Jay’s battle with cancer began in 2015, when her dentist noticed she had an autoimmune condition called lichen planus.
The condition causes a rash and can appear anywhere on the body, but it is common in the mouth.
“For me, it looked a little bit like a white cobweb on my tongue,” says Jay. “My dentist pointed it out during a checkup and until then I hadn’t really noticed it.” Although lichen planus is usually harmless and clears up on its own, in two per cent of cases it can develop into cancer. Jay’s dentist sent her to the hospital for a biopsy, which thankfully showed no abnormal cells.
She kept an eye on the condition but wasn’t particularly concerned.
Then, during a routine dental appointment in January 2018, her dentist noticed the lichen planus had began to spread from the front to the back of her tongue and advised her to get it looked at again.
“The dentist told me he didn’t like the look of it and that I should go back to the hospital,” she says. “It took me a while to have a biopsy because every time I went to hospital I had a concert the next day and I didn’t want to affect my singing.
“In hindsight it was silly, but I thought there was only a low chance of it being cancerous,” she admits.
Eventually, in April 2018, she had the biopsy. She was on the treadmill at the gym when her phone rang – the hospital wanted her to come back in to discuss the biopsy results.
There were precancerous cells in her tongue and she would need to have some of it removed. “It was a terrible shock,” she says.
But after initial surgery in May came more devastating news.The section of tongue they’d removed had cancerous cells throughout and they couldn’t yet tell where else they’d spread to. Jay was devastated.
“At that point, they can’t tell you what stage the cancer is.
“I wrote my will out, I planned things for my family.You plan for the worst but hope for the best.”
And Jay is not alone. In the last 25 years, incidence of mouth cancer has increased 135 per cent according to the Mouth Cancer Foundation, with a more than 60 per cent increase in the last 10 years alone.
Jay was particularly concerned about her daughter Josie, who was preparing for her GCSEs at the time. “My biggest fear was leaving Josie. She’s my world. I want to live to see her grow up, get married and maybe have grandchildren.” Ever the professional, Jay rushed to record the remaining vocals before having the surgery. Then in June 2018, just a week after her diagnosis, she had a seven-hour operation to remove 40 per cent of her tongue. Surgeons fashioned a new tongue using tissue from Jay’s thigh, which was fed into her mouth through her neck. Finally, they removed her top teeth in case she needed to have radio or chemotherapy. Afterwards, she was in agony. “I looked like I’d been to a Halloween party. I didn’t want my daughter to see me.
“I was very swollen up, it was pretty grim.” Because of the tracheotomy, she couldn’t talk, and had to use a whiteboard.
THEN, 10 days after the operation, her surgeon came to tell her there was no trace of cancer left.
“I cried tears of joy” she says.
Since then, the road to recovery has been a long one. She has a seven-inch scar on her thigh and a scar on her neck from the tracheotomy.
But after months of physiotherapy, she can speak again and only has a slight lisp. Singing, she says, has helped rehabilitate her more quickly. “Being a singer helps because you’re overusing your mouth when you’re singing. “I was in a show over Christmas and they did a lot of tongue-twisters and vocal exercises before the performances. “At the beginning I couldn’t do any of them, but after a few weeks I could do almost all of it.
“My doctors have been quite interested in that.”
She hopes that her speech will improve even further. “I’m still recovering and building more muscle. Over time, stem cells come to the new tissue and tell it to act like tongue tissue instead of thigh tissue.”
And next month, she will have false teeth implanted to replace the ones she lost. Meanwhile, her band mates have been incredibly supportive. “We’ve had our moments but there’s something that bonds us together.”
Since her diagnosis, Jay’s been determined to take things a little easier from now on.
“If I’m guilty of one thing it’s that I’m too much of a doer. I need to realise it’s OK to take it easy sometimes.”
But with the album set to be released on March 6, there’s no chance of her slowing down just yet.