Emmerdale’s Zoe I won’t treat this like my last Christmas
SOAP STAR LEAH ON TERMINAL CANCER
Many people in Leah Bracknell’s position might be planning something special this Christmas. It is 15 months since the former Emmerdale actress was diagnosed with incurable lung cancer.
Surgery was not an option; chemotherapy would only extend her life by a month or two. Yet 54-year-old Leah remains physically strong, remarkably upbeat, and her plans for Christmas with her husband Jez Hughes and her two grown daughters are surprisingly low key. “We haven’t arranged anything, it will all be very last minute,” she says. “So, in other words, it will be exactly the same as it always is.
“I could think, ‘We are going to have the biggest Christmas tree, people will be able to see it in Cornwall, and we’ll have reindeer on the roof ’. But that would be like saying, this might be my last Christmas, get through it and I’ll have done that. I don’t think like that.”
There will be one difference. At this time of year, Leah is usually deep into panto season. It became an annual ritual after she found fame as Emmerdale vet Zoe Tate, the soap world’s first openly lesbian character, nearly 30 years ago.
But this Christmas she is not working. She says: “No one is employing me since I was diagnosed, the phone hasn’t been ringing.”
Instead Leah, who left Emmerdale in 2006, has focused on using her experience as a yoga and shamanic healing instructor to help her stay upbeat and channel that positive energy.
Glass half-full has become her mantra, one she believes has complemented her more conventional medical care and helped her defy the tumour so far. It’s an outlook she wants others with cancer and terminal illnesses to embrace too.
She hopes her own experiences could help people have a more “positive relationship” with their disease.
She has organised a special event, Cancer and the Art of Living, in London next month to share her story and some of her techniques. If that proves a success, she hopes to take the talk on tour around the country, which will also help raise money for further treatment.
Leah says: “This is my way of trying to give something back and say thank you for all the support I have received.
“I want it to be an uplifting experience. That’s what I want my life to be now.”
What she seems to be, more than anything else, is endlessly upbeat. Many in her situation could easily sink into depression or anger, but not Leah.
She says: “It’s easy to start disliking your body and the tumour. So now I say thank you to my body a lot.”
Staying positive with cancer can be difficult, and Leah admits her head drops at times. In those moments, she recalls she is grateful to be alive as she nearly died before her cancer was diagnosed.
She was rushed to hospital in September last year after her abdomen became swollen and she started struggling to breathe. Four different GPs and X-rays failed to spot fluid was building up around her heart, until Leah was forced to call an ambulance while home alone.
“If I hadn’t picked up the phone, I would not be here,” she says.
Doctors drained the fluid from her chest and put her on a ventilator to help her breathe, before tests revealed she had stagefour lung cancer. Though she smoked when she was younger, she was told that could not cause the type of tumour she had.
Leah, who lives in Worthing, West Sussex, says: “Devastating doesn’t convey how shattering that diagnosis is. “Telling my daughters was the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do. I didn’t know what to do, but eventually I
Telling my daughters was the hardest thing I’ve had to do LEAH BRACKNELL ON BREAKING CANCER NEWS
right, I’m cried out now. I could have died but I was still alive – that was a gift. I had the time to tell my family how much I love them and decide how I wanted to live.”
Leah initially chose not to have chemotherapy as it offered her little extra time.
She also refused to ask how long doctors expected her to live, for fear that if the prognosis was poor, part of her would accept that and it would chip away at her positive outlook.
Instead, her research suggested immunotherapy, which boosts the body’s own ability to fight the cancer, was her best chance of prolonging her life.
But it was not available on the NHS and she would have to pay for treatment privately in Germany. Her family appealed to relatives and friends for help raising the money on a private Facebook page, but it wasn’t long before the news spread and the public raised nearly £65,000 in just two weeks.
Leah says: “I am the most private person, so it was a real shock. All of a sudden, my whole life was thrown into the public arena. That was awful, but the response from the public was overwhelming.”
Before Leah could fly out, a new consultant discovered she was eligible for a targeted drug which she qualified for thanks to her Chinese heritage on her mother’s side. But by March this year, it was clear the new treatment was no longer working.
She had her first chemo in the summer to help manage symptoms, which now qualifies Leah for a new immunotherapy drug only recently approved in the UK. She says: “I tried to get into the mindset that I would work with the chemothought, therapy. I kept telling myself I chose to do this and it was going to make me feel better.”
For Leah, travelling to Germany remains an option, but she will need to raise even more money to fund the expensive treatment. In the meantime, the generous donations have helped fund a range of alternative treatments, including an infrared sauna which Leah uses every day to keep her body temperature up.
She uses a range of supplements, plant oil, meditation, and has attended a shamanic festival in France. She has also completely changed her diet.
She says: “I was a vegetarian, but I had to start eating meat again. I have also cut out sugar. Cancer adores sugar.” Despite the constant challenges and dark days, Leah – who also writes a blog, somethingbeginningwithc.com – insists some of the best moments of her life have come during the last year, as she has ditched many of the menial jobs that took up so much of her time.
“I wake up every day excited. I didn’t do that before the cancer,” she says. “I’m just really glad to be here. I wasn’t expected to live that long, so I am just going to carry on, gloriously living, no matter what the doctors are saying.”
Cancer and the Art of Living will be at Cecil Sharp House in Camden, North West London, on January 18. Tickets can be booked at: www.cecilsharphouse.org/ component/content/article/21-shared/ shared-events/5090-cancer-and-the-artof-living-an-evening-with-leah-bracknell.