A VERY soulful SISTER ACT
You wouldn’t guess from their smiles, but these two young women have incurable cancer that’s left them childless. In this deeply emotive interview, they tell how — despite meeting only six months ago — their shared suffering has made them best friends
WhAT makes a true friendship? For some, it’s shared memories; a long association nurtured over many years. But Nicky Newman and Laura Middleton-hughes have known each other just six months. even so, they’ve forged a bond as close as sisters.
The kinship that binds them is intuitive. They understand each other’s pain, laugh together, recognise each other’s secret thoughts and fears.
‘When we first met, we ran up to each other and just hugged,’ says Laura. ‘It was like internet dating!’
‘Manic!’ agrees Nicky. ‘I was thinking, “What’s she going to be like?” And we just clicked.’
‘And now we’re the closest of friends,’ adds Laura. ‘ We just relate to each other 100 per cent. With Nicky, I can talk about everything and anything and I know she’ll understand.’
Laura and Nicky’s friendship is forged from adversity. you may not believe it when you look at their smiling faces and the glow of health that seems to emanate from them, but both have incurable secondary cancer.
Treatment for the tumours, that began in their breasts but have now spread through their bodies, has made them both infertile: sharing the sorrow that neither will have children has proved a solace and comfort.
The two — both married, both united by the knowledge that the drugs keeping them alive could fail at any point and cut short lives once full of hope and promise — refuse to succumb to despair.
Buoyed by each other’s optimism, they are determined to wring every drop of joy out of the time left to them.
‘We laugh a lot,’ says Laura, 31. ‘you’d think having cancer would be dark and upsetting but we smile and have fun. And as much as it has ruined our lives, it brings good things as well. It’s made me a much better person. I understand other people’s struggles now. I have a zest for life I didn’t have before.’
‘I push myself out of my comfort zone because I know life is short,’ adds Nicky, 32. ‘And if you do that, amazing things happen. If it wasn’t for cancer, we wouldn’t have become friends.’
Their paths first crossed through an online cancer community and now they’ve set up their own web platform, Secondary Sisters — the name came to Nicky in a flash — to ‘offer information, hope and basically a bit of fun’ to others with secondary or metastatic cancer.
‘Things happen for a reason,’ says Laura. ‘ Cancer sucks. I’d rather not have it, of course. But it’s given us great opportunities to help other people. We have a future, although we face a very bumpy one, and we’re going to live it.’
‘We’ve found our purpose, haven’t we?’ says Nicky. ‘And if we can help even one person feel better about themselves, and like they’re part of a community, that’s wonderful.’
They
first made headlines when they posed, naked but for their knickers, for a shoot portraying True Cancer Bodies in April. The image was arresting: both women painted their bodies with words associated with secondary cancer including ‘pain’, ‘infertility’, ‘fatigue’ and ‘stage 4’.
‘We did the photo in response to well-meaning “fluffy” health campaigns with slogans like “two is better than one” which we thought was insensitive to people with breast cancer and didn’t represent the truth,’ explains Laura.
‘Before I had cancer, I’d have been covering myself in a towel, but it gives you such confidence to be proud of your body, scars and all, because our bodies are keeping us alive. And it was at that shoot — where most of us were sitting around chatting and bonding wearing not very much at all — that Nicky and I got talking.
‘ We’re the same age, going through very similar treatment plans and we’d both lost the chance to have children, which was devastating. So we swapped details and quickly we were chatting to each other on social media; even calling each other in the early hours if we were in pain and couldn’t sleep.
‘Soon we were messaging each other every day,’ says Nicky, ‘So we said, “Why don’t we meet up?” ’ So just eight weeks ago Nicky, who works in a finance brokerage, is married to electrical engineer Alex, and lives in Guildford, arranged to meet former hairdresser Laura, from Norwich, whose husband is taxi-driver Brad.
‘ It was bizarre,’ says Nicky, ‘ because pre- cancer I suffered from anxiety and I’d never have agreed to meet someone I barely knew in London. Before I was diagnosed, two years ago, I wouldn’t even have had the courage to walk into a restaurant in front of my husband. But cancer has given me oodles of confidence. I owe it that. you grab life.’
‘you don’t worry what people think any more, do you?’ agrees Laura. ‘And on the day we met, at Waterloo Station, we just clicked. We had a lovely lunch together and a really intense conversation. We told each other more than we’d ever told our closest friends and families. What was so amazing was having someone else who truly “got it”, who could relate 100 per cent to what I was going through.
‘That day, we made our first video together to put on social media and people said, “you’ve got such a natural rapport. you just bounce off each other.” ’
‘And it was then that we both agreed to set up Secondary Sisters,’ says Nicky.
LAurA
opened a youTube channel and Instagram account for their fledgling platform that evening. It quickly caught the eye of Stand up To Cancer, a campaign that aims to unite scientists, celebrities and communities across the uK to raise cash for rapid new treatments.
It is supported by presenters Davina McCall and Maya Jama, comedians Alan Carr and Joe Lycett, and Olympic long jump champion Greg rutherford — and now Nicky and Laura have joined this line-up.
When we meet they are dressed in flirty florals — two bright and beautiful young women whose glossy hair and wide smiles belie the fact that their futures have been snatched away.
A year ago, Nicky and her husband were trying for a baby through IVF when her hopes were cruelly destroyed.
‘We were going for our first round of IVF when I started to get back pain. I went for physio and they thought it was a prolapsed disc,’ she recalls.
‘Then, we’d just finished the first treatment — which wasn’t successful — when I found a lump in my breast while I was in the shower. I mentioned it to the IVF nurse who said it was probably because I’d been pumped full of hormones.
‘But I went to my GP anyway, and he fast-tracked me through to hospital. I was there for seven hours, had ten biopsies, mammograms, an ultrasound scan and my bloods taken. I remember being concerned about my fertility; that was at the top of my mind. I said, “What happens to my eggs?” I was supposed to be starting IVF again, and they told me, “Don’t worry. They are on ice.”
‘I felt weirdly calm. My gut told me I had cancer. I was prepared for the news. It was all a blur and for the next two weeks I had more scans — on my brain and body — and more checks.
‘At that stage I thought we’d have another chance at IVF. Then I saw my breast surgeon, thinking I’d have to have chemo and a
I push myself out of my comfort zone because I know life is short
mastectomy. But the news was worse than that. She said, “I’m really sorry but there’s nothing I can do. It’s already spread to pretty much every bone in your body,” and at that point my world fell apart.
‘I knew nothing about secondary cancer then. I thought it must be bone cancer. I didn’t know that breast cancer cells could spread to other parts of your body.
‘I felt as if my world had collapsed, as if I was in a dream screaming and no one could hear me. I said, “How long have I got?” and she said, “I can’t tell you that.” I came out feeling lost. If you imagine all your life is written on a piece of paper it was as if someone had screwed it up and thrown it in a bin. I didn’t want to see anyone, speak to anyone; face anyone. I just wanted to be at home. I cried a lot and I was almost physically sick with stress.’
On Friday, April 13, last year, Nicky was given an official diagnosis by her oncologist, told she had stage four secondary breast cancer that had spread to her bones. She was put on the drug palbociclib which targets cancer cells and stops them growing.
It had only just been approved for NHS use and ‘it was a gamechanger’ she says.
She takes it with a panoply of other pills; hormone tablets, calcium, because cancer riddles so many of her bones; anti-nausea drugs. Her fervent hope is that the treatment continues to work, although she knows the day will come when it ceases to.
‘And we try not to look too far ahead because it’s scary,’ says Laura, who was diagnosed in 2014, when she was 25, just as her life and career — she worked as a bridal hairdresser — had taken off.
She was on a holiday in Australia with her husband when she discovered a pea-sized lump in her breast while taking a shower.
‘I didn’t think it would be anything to worry about — I thought it was just a cyst — but when I got home, I went to my GP who referred me immediately to hospital.’
A day of tests including ultrasound scans, a biopsy and two mammograms followed.
‘I said to my husband, “There’s obviously something wrong”, and that was the first time I thought it could be cancer. And I didn’t tell anyone about the lump.
‘Two weeks later, I got the results and they said, “I’m really sorry. It’s breast cancer.” I just remember feeling really numb. You go into this dream state where you can’t think or act.
‘I said to my husband, “What am I going to do about work?” I had clients — brides-to-be — booked for the whole summer and that was my first thought.’ She asked husband Brad to call her dad. ‘But my mum had a neurological illness and I didn’t want her to know at first. Then I remember going through the door at home and just breaking down. Nothing was going in. It felt as if a heavy black cloud had come down.’ A couple of weeks on, she’d begun chemo: ‘I was violently sick and my hair started falling out, but I took control, put a little party together and invited ten friends round to help me shave my head.
‘ Then, five days after the treatment, I felt as if I’d been hit by a bus. I couldn’t walk from my living room to the kitchen. My bones ached. I felt exhausted, just rotten.’ The assault on her system seemed merciless. Three weeks after she finished chemotherapy she had a mastectomy. ‘I just wanted my breast off. It was trying to kill me,’ she says.
Radiotherapy followed. ‘I felt fine for the first few sessions, then I looked as if I’d had an iron on my chest; all blistered and bruised. And I was attempting to work, to preserve normality.’ For a year, she took the targeted cancer drug herceptin, then in May 2015, her treatment over, she celebrated with a ‘Fifty Shades of Pink’ party.
She opted to have her other breast removed — for aesthetic reasons — and had both reconstructed. ‘And then I felt I was starting to rebuild my life.’
But worse was to come. In April 2016, she was in the gym when she developed a pain in her right shoulder. ‘ I thought I’d injured it through over-exercising,’ she says.
Laura’s mum died in June 2016; for a while, her own health was put on hold. Then, when the pain in her arm worsened to an extent that she couldn’t move it, her doctor booked her an emergency CT scan. Within a couple of hours, she was seeing her oncologist again. The day is seared into her memory.
‘I was told that the whole of my humerus (the long bone in the upper arm between the elbow and shoulder) was a tumour. It was so big it had fractured part of my arm. The doctor said it was incurable cancer and that I wouldn’t be able to have children. I thought I’d only have weeks or months to live. I was scared; in bits, with tears streaming down my face, completely numb. I remember feeling as if I was with someone else who was being told the terrible news.
‘And strangely it was not being able to have kids that hit hardest. I’d always wanted children.’
Later, scans showed secondary cancer had spread to her pelvis and spine. She had surgery to replace her shoulder. ‘As soon as the wound was healed I had more chemotherapy. I was very sick. Whenever I was able, I’d get out and about, but I spent days in bed.’
She lists ten different drugs she still takes daily which keep her condition stable, including hormones, bone strengtheners, tablets to counteract the neuropathy in her feet and painkillers.
‘You rattle, don’t you darling?’ smiles Nicky.
‘But I can live a relatively normal life — although it revolves round jabs, scans, doctors’ appointments, and I’ll be on this regime, or some form of treatment, for ever,’ says Laura. ‘I don’t want to look too far forward and be disappointed, so I don’t plan more than a year ahead.’
BOTH
women’s cancer is currently stable. Their lives — productive and busy — are focused on helping others.
They try to stay positive. Nicky still works part- time but Laura’s reconstructed shoulder does not allow her to continue hairdressing. ‘There are days when even taking a shower is an effort, when you’re wiped out,’ she says. ‘But you put a face on, do your hair and people say, “You look so well!”
‘Our cancer is incurable now, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be a drug in future that will change that. So we have to keep hoping,’ says Laura.
‘Meanwhile we enjoy life,’ says Nicky. ‘We’re not veggie or vegan. We like a glass of wine, chocolates and a steak. Most people have a very different view about the holistic side of cancer. They cut out dairy, sugar and alcohol. That’s fine for them but we think, “Let’s have a bit of fun.” ’
‘A bit of cake never hurt anyone,’ adds Laura.
‘I told my oncologist I was going to a wedding and asked if I could have a glass of wine. He said, “Have a whole bottle!” laughs Nicky.
‘Having a little drink once in a while isn’t going to kill us,’ adds Laura — and they’re laughing all over again.