MY CANCER JOURNEY INSPIRED MY FILM
Jennifer Knowles was writing a film about two cancer patients when she discovered that she had the disease herself…
When Jennifer Knowles began making a film about the bond of friendship between two cancer patients, she could never have dreamed that she would end up using her own experiences as a survivor of the disease herself.
Jennifer started writing Running Naked with her BAFTA-nominated husband Michael while expecting their daughter Frances in 2011.
Out of the blue, she received the devastating news that she was facing her own real-life health battle, after being diagnosed with a rare pregnancy-related cancer.
“I was in complete shock,” Jennifer recalls. “I could barely take it in. The word cancer just reverberated round in my head.
“It was heavily ironic that I should be writing a film about cancer and then experience it myself.”
Jennifer (48) had been feeling fit and well until she suddenly started bleeding heavily at 33 weeks of pregnancy. She phoned an ambulance and was rushed to hospital where doctors were initially baffled.
“I just kept bleeding, but the baby was OK,” she recalls.
Eventually she received the diagnosis that she was suffering from choriocarcinoma, a fast-growing cancer which occurs in one in 50,000 pregnancies. “They told me that they needed to get the baby out quickly so they could start treating me with chemotherapy,” Jennifer says.
Two days later, on May 6, daughter Frances was born by Caesarean section at Stockport’s Stepping Hill Hospital. Because she had been born so early Frances was rushed to the neo-natal unit where she was given oxygen and fed by a tube.
Meanwhile Jennifer was taken to Sheffield’s Weston Park Hospital 30 miles away, one of only two specialist centres in the UK which treat patients with cancer affecting pregnant women.
She recalls, “I was transferred to a different hospital by ambulance. It really hit me when I arrived there and saw the words Cancer Unit. For the first time in my life, I experienced a panic attack. I’d gone from the maternity unit to the cancer unit; that was really hard.
“I was expressing milk for Frances, which was then rushed down to the other
“The film was an easy way of processing what had happened to me”
hospital. I had pictures of her up on the wall, but I couldn’t see her or hold her or cuddle her and I was worried whether she would pull through. It was really distressing.”
Frances, or Frankie, remained in hospital for a month before being given the all-clear to return to the family home in Derbyshire to join Jennifer, film producer Michael and their young son George, then three.
Doctors meanwhile had discovered tumours on Jennifer’s lungs and in her vagina. She was allowed home, but continued to spend three out of every ten days in hospital to undergo chemotherapy treatment.
Then – almost four months later, at the end of August – came the news she had been waiting for. The cancer had finally gone.
Almost immediately she sat down at her computer and began work on the film again.
“It was an easy way of processing what had happened to me, in a light-hearted manner,” Jennifer explains.
“Having cancer makes you wonder what life is all about. It jerks you out of your comfort zone and makes you reassess what you want from life.”
Today, Jennifer’s hormone levels are still checked every 13 weeks, but 10 years on both she and Frances are healthy.
“I was very lucky that it was a treatable cancer, so touch wood we’ve been OK – thank God,” she smiles.