Fitness trainer with cancer beats Covid-19 and vows to keep cycling
A WOMAN who survived coronavirus in the midst of chemotherapy for Stage 4 cervical cancer has praised her friends and rabbi for their “love and friendship”
Hillary Bentwood, 49, told the JC she was “too ill to worry” when she was rushed to hospital with exhaustion and breathing difficulties and then was told she had contracted Covid 19.
The mother-of-two — who runs the CyClub spin studio in Hampstead Garden Suburb and is a member of New North London Synagogue with her husband Howard — is still recovering from the effects of the virus, which she contracted last month only days after having undergone a gruelling round of chemotherapy, having been diagnosed with cervical cancer last year.
“I feel blessed. Cancer aside, I feel I have a second chance at life and want to make the most of every moment,” she said.
“My diagnosis of cancer was a bombshell but love and friendship has kept me going.
“Rabbi Jonathan (Wittenberg) and many, many friends and acquaintances are including me in their tehillim, both here and abroad, for which I am very grateful.
“Rabbi Jonathan has always been a wonderful man.
“It makes me emotional just thinking about the continued support I have received over these past few months.
Her business partner Sharon Jaffe had also brought Rabbi Bentzi Sudak of Chabad over to her home to offer support when she was first diagnosed with cancer. “He spent time checking our mezuzot.”
After surgery in December and then chemo, Mrs Brentwood learned her cancer had spread and was incurable.
Placed on an intensive chemo regime, and with her hair beginning to fall out, she carried on teaching spin classes when feeling strong enough.
Extra precautions were taken at the studio to try to protect her from Covid-19.
“My oncologist was confident at this point that I should keep living life with the same measures as everybody else,”
she recalled. But three days after her fourth and final round of chemo on March 12, her health was rapidly declining.
She was too unwell to leave her bed, which was particularly difficult for someone for whom “to stay in bed is a never.”
She did not take her temperature, believing her symptoms were a result of the chemo.
The next day, her cough got worse, and, by day six, after Panadol failed to bring her temperature down, she realised she had to go to hospital.
“With chemo patients if we get a temperature over 37.5 degrees we are supposed to call into hospital as our immunity is compromised and we can become Neutropenic, which is life-threatening,” she said. She was taken to an oncology unit and treated as if she had neutropenia, sepsis or coronavirus. The hospital tested her blood, it was established she did not have neutropenia and she left after an overnight stay on antibiotic drips and paracetamol fluid.
Mrs Brentwood was advised to isolate but two days later the oncology unit rang to say she had tested positive for coronavirus — but to stay calm, keep a close check on her temperature and to call back if she became breathless.
“My cough was terrible and uncontrollable but I could breath,’’ she recalled.
“Shallow breaths were all I could manage but I knew I just had to get oxygen to my blood and shallow breathing would do it.
“I did this for three days. And I think I felt too ill to worry too much.” Mrs Bentwood eventually went into an isolation ward at the Princess Grace Hospital in Marylebone. She remained in constant contact with her oncologist.
“I am truly grateful that he choose not to tell me of the risk to my life,’’ she says. “He did not consider it appropriate to have that conversation with me whilst I was so unwell. For me calm is key, panic just causes more pain.”
As she was recovering on Monday, the oncologist revealed that her life had indeed been under severe threat.
Next Monday she is due to have chemo for the first time in five weeks. Some coronavirus patients were given the option to refrain from chemo but Mrs Brentwood said: “Mine is incurable stage 4 cancer. I don’t have that choice.”
But she said: “I have a need to make myself stronger and to train... It has saved me before all this cancer and coronavirus stuff, and it’s still my guiding light now. I have things to do, classes to teach and a body to put on display.
“I am too young to die. I still have so much I need to do, that’s what keeps me positive.”