Let’s celebrate Dame Deborah for saving thousands of lives
EVERY so often, someone captures the nation’s heartstrings and becomes a household name. During the pandemic, Captain Tom Moore seized a moment when we were frightened and powerless – and gave us hope and a sense of awe with his magnificent NHS fundraising efforts.
More recently, broadcaster and former teacher, Deborah James has had a similar impact.
A few weeks ago, the only people who knew her story were listeners to her BBC podcast – You, Me And The Big C.
Today, Dame Deborah – such was her impact that Prince William visited her at home to bestow the honour on her – stands as an iconic figure.
Her death will be mourned across Britain. But if we are to mourn her in the spirit she showed when we got to know her, we will not so much bemoan her loss as celebrate her life – and the huge contribution she made to others’ lives.
Because there is no doubt at all that Dame Deborah managed something few of us can even attempt. She saved many lives – and did so through the sheer force of her personality.
By treating her cancer in what seemed almost a matter of fact way, she didn’t so much take the fear out of cancer as humanise it, and thus encouraged others to get checked if they showed the symptoms of her own bowel cancer.
IT IS no exaggeration to say that she may have saved tens of thousands of lives by getting people diagnosed early – the key to treating almost any cancer. Charities say that she has had a unique and transformative impact.
As for that fear of cancer… let me get personal.
A few years ago I had a routine shoulder operation. My GP said the accompanying blood tests were not wholly satisfactory so she sent me to see a haematologist. Fool that I was, I didn’t twig that an emergency referral for that afternoon was something to worry about. I was blasé, and thus entirely unprepared for the moment when the consultant told me I had a form of leukaemia.
It hit me almost physically. I felt as if someone had punched me in the solar plexus. I walked out dazed, unable to remember anything from the half-hour consultation except the basic diagnosis.
More than anything, I was afraid – afraid above all that I would not see my children grow up and that they would lose their father.
Let me now fast forward. Today, thanks to a wondrous form of targeted chemotherapy, I take a series of pills every day and my blood count is more or less normal. I still have some symptoms – I am more or less permanently tired and have to ration those nights when I can stay awake beyond about 9pm.
But overall, I feel as if I am part of a medical miracle.
In reality, of course, I am simply a beneficiary of science and luck – the luck that I was diagnosed relatively early in my cancer’s attempt to kill me, despite my being so blissfully – stupidly – unaware of the symptoms I was demonstrating.
The treatment is less than a decade old, so no one knows how long the benefits last, but I am certainly no longer afraid.
For me, one of the most important mechanisms for coping – and for dealing with the fear – was patient forums, in which real people discussed their experiences and lessons they had learnt, often with brutal honesty.
THAT’S one reason Dame Deborah has been so important. In a way she was a one woman patient’s forum for the nation.
For sure, the taboo over being honest about cancer ended a long time ago – I remember the journalist John Diamond’s pioneering columns about his cancer in the 1990s – but until Dame Deborah’s fundraising and the clarity with which she spoke about her life with cancer, there have been no national figures dealing with its reality.
That, surely, is her greatest contribution, even more valuable than the (astonishing) £7million her appeal has raised so far. She didn’t just put cancer on the front pages, she demystified it and brought home to all of us how important it is that we get checked.
Some 39.5 per cent of men and women will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime, and someone is diagnosed every two minutes in the UK.
The earlier cancer is diagnosed, the better the chance of survival is. That means, as Dame Deborah put it in her interviews, we have to talk – for some cancers – about poo.
One hangover of Covid is that some people are reluctant to report symptoms to a GP. Please, please, please – get yourself checked. Far better to find it’s a false alarm, than not to find out that you have cancer. Do it for Dame Deborah.
‘Far better to find it’s a false alarm than not find out you have cancer’