PLEASE CHECK YOUR
Actress calls for action as she tells of chance test that saved her life
TO A CERTAIN generation of teenage boys Paula Ann Bland was their schoolgirl fantasy. In the mid 1980s Paula stirred schoolboy emotions across the nation as teenage temptress Claire Scott in hit BBC show Grange Hill. She then went on to a successful modelling career. But now she has revealed how she has had part of her breast removed following a cancer scare and is urging women to check for lumps before it is too late.
Paula, 50, a mother of two, had surgery last week and is now believed to be cancer-free but still faces chemotherapy and radiography to ensure the disease has gone. A large cyst was discovered in one of her breasts following an MRI scan for a different complaint.
The first she knew about it was a phone call from the hospital six weeks after it was discovered in October, a delay about which she is extremely angry.
She visited her GP immediately and he fasttracked her into tests which revealed she has stage three triple negative breast cancer.
Paula recalled when she was summoned into the consultant’s office at the hospital on New Year’s Eve and told the news.
“When you hear that word cancer you can’t hear anything else, everything else becomes just white noise,” she says.
“I could hear what people were saying to me but I could not take it in. I had to go back the next day with a close friend, Mark Baxter, who played Duane alongside me in Grange Hill.
“Mark had been through his own battle with cancer some years earlier, so he could well understand what the consultant had to say a lot better, I just could not take it in.”
Once she got over the shock, Paula was determined to put herself into a positive mode.
As a single mother to Daniel, 22, who is at university and Isabella, 16, studying for A-levels, she was not prepared to cave in.
She says: “I am not even prepared to contemplate the worst right now – for the kids’ sake more than mine – I am going to fight this thing with everything.”
Paula is hopeful she has won the first round of her battle after surgery on Tuesday to remove part of a breast revealed that the cancerous cells had not spread to her lymph nodes.
Despite that news she will still have to undergo weeks of chemotherapy and radiography to ensure any other cells contaminated by cancer are destroyed.
She believes one of the ways she can beat the disease is to share her experiences with other women to inform them about cure and prevention.
In the case of prevention, Paula is adamant the three-year gap between mammary scans is far too long. She was given the all-clear following a routine mammogram only in 2017, less than two years before. Paula thinks women should be advised to check their own breasts at least once a week because that is how quickly a lump can start from “nothing to something”.
Following the positive outcome of Tuesday’s surgery, her relief is tempered by a sense of loss.
She said she was thankful the signs are positive and she may be cancer-free. Yet, along with thousands of other women who have undergone a similar procedure, she has to deal with the loss of part of her breast.
Not only is she missing a sizeable piece, leaving her bust uneven, but the operation has left a long scar.
Paula says: “I understand it had to be done to save my life and this is better than the worst scenario of a double mastectomy and removal of the ovaries, but the procedure still leaves you without an important part of your identity as a woman.
“I think men possibly do not understand the significance of breast cancer in the consciousness of women.
“Whatever a woman’s breast size, whether their breasts are large, small or whatever shape, they represent a definitive part of a woman’s identity... their very being.”
Paula played Claire Scott in Grange Hll for six years until her character reached 16 and had to depart school for the grown-up world.
She was then regularly seen out on the town in nightspots such as Stringfellows and accepted offers to model topless. That was a decision that scandalised her former headmistress, Sister Sheila, at her Surrey convent school. She insists she has no regrets about posing topless for Page Three and Mayfair magazine, saying: “It was nothing you couldn’t see on the beach.
“I was proud of my body and happy to show it off, it was for a very short period and I got so much other modelling work from it.
“It was also a way of giving the finger to my school where I had to suffer a lot of bullying.
“Because I was doing Grange Hill there was the inevitable jealousy from some other pupils and instead of protecting me the staff would even encourage the bullying by highlighting my involvement in the show.
“If they were disciplining me over some minor offence such as coming late into a lesson they would always have to punctuate a rebuke with ‘You’re not at Grange Hill here’ or ‘This isn’t the BBC now, you know’.”
Page Three didn’t affect her acting career as she went on to appear in many leading TV series, such as Only Fools And Horses, and alongside Jimmy Nail in Spender. Paula
‘I am not even going to contemplate the worst right now, for the kids’ sake more than mine’