Cancer isn’t always beaten, but it can be lived with
Like all truly remarkable people, Deborah James is an ordinary person who has responded extraordinarily to the events life has thrown at her. Deborah was a deputy head teacher and 35-year-old mother of two when she was diagnosed, three years ago, with incurable stage four bowel cancer; one study she read gave her seven months to live. She’s since stopped asking her oncologist for what she jokingly refers to as “sell-by dates”, for good reason. He told her that he would do everything in his power to keep her alive, and that he has: this week, she got the news that she was free of the disease. Deborah – who hosts the You,
Me and the Big C podcast – has found herself in the unexpected position of becoming a poster girl for “beating” cancer.
She finds this narrative difficult to listen to because such language suggests that strength of character has something to do with cancer survival rates, when she knows that this is absolutely not the case, having watched friends such as Rachael Bland, the journalist who co-hosted the podcast, die of the disease.
Cancer is an arbitrary illness, and Deborah has not “beaten” it; she is simply free of it for the time being, which is undeniably very good news indeed, but not quite the magic cure it has been touted as in the papers. “I am still s--scared,” she texted me this week.
I’m lucky enough to count Deborah as a friend, and chatting to her yesterday I realised that the most remarkable part of her story is not that she has “beaten” cancer – it’s how she has learnt to live with it. For Deborah is one of a growing band of people who are rewriting the normal narrative of cancer as an illness that destroys lives. For her, it is one that has reshaped her life and encouraged her to live it properly, as if each day might be her last. It is an attitude we could all learn from.
Deborah has an unstoppable energy that comes in part from the steroids she must take on a regular basis, but also from… well, knowing you have an incurable illness. She runs and dances and takes her family on impromptu weekends away to Morocco. Last May, we did a 10k together, and she was much, much faster than me; this despite the fact she had done a triathlon the day before.
Oh, and that she has to have chemotherapy every week. When she crossed the line she celebrated with a beer, before going straight to the airport to take her kids on a half-term holiday to Ibiza. As I watched her cheerily go on her way, I briefly thought of getting a tattoo on my arm that read “BE MORE DEBORAH”.
I have another friend, a woman called Emma Campbell, who was diagnosed with breast cancer shortly after the birth of her triplets 10 years ago. Emma has secondary breast cancer, which means it has moved into other parts of her body, and last year she asked me to help her get into running as she wanted to get “really fit” before she had a third of her lung removed. How could I sit fat-bottomed on the sofa at such a request? So we started running together several times a week, and on the morning of her operation she did her first 10k. The week before her mastectomy, we did the Great South Run. Like Deborah, Emma is now cancerfree, and we are all planning to do the London Marathon together in April.
Often, I have to remind myself that Deborah and Emma are undergoing treatment for cancer, that every week they must make the journey to the Royal Marsden, which they often do on foot, running. People like Deborah and Emma are reinventing attitudes towards cancer; they have taken the stiff upper lip mentality and turned it into a stiff upper thigh. They are getting on with their lives, but they are also refusing to ignore how cancer affects them.
It is tempting to describe women like Deborah and Emma as “fearless”, but I know they would hate this: they would say that they are not fearless, because they are human. Unmistakably, beautifully human, and this, in the end, is their superpower. They do not shy away from the realities of their illnesses, but nor do they allow themselves to be defined by them. They give hope to us all. Cancer cannot always be beaten. But it can be lived with, and as both Deborah and Emma are showing, it can be lived with well.