Snipers’ bullets didn’t scare me but cancer does
BBC star who braved war zones on her toughest fight
HOW best to describe TV reporter Sue Lloyd-Roberts? The adjectives brave, resourceful and indefatigable do not quite cover it. Sue, 62, has for the past three decades travelled the world as a foreign correspondent for the BBC and ITN, reporting from war zones, exposing tyrannous regimes and giving voice to the repressed and vulnerable. She’s dodged snipers’ bullets. She’s been arrested so many times she has jokingly considered compiling a Good Jail Guide.
She was the first journalist to wheedle her way into the besieged Syrian city of Homs in 2011. She has garnered a string of awards.
And she travelled alone; there was no burly threeman film crew backing her up, just Sue compiling her own footage on a video camera.
Yet today she faces her most daunting challenge yet: an aggressive and life-threatening form of leukaemia.
While she has already undergone two rounds of chemotherapy, her survival depended on finding a stem cell donor — and she admits her fear is greater than any she felt facing dangers in her career.
‘Until now, I’ve always joked that the part of my brain that recognises fear doesn’t exist,’ she says. ‘I’ve pinched myself in the past at army checkpoints or when a sniper has opened fire, and thought: “It might be appropriate to feel a little bit frightened now.”
‘But, instead, in those situations I’ve been extremely cool. I’ve gone into an almost automaton mode.
‘I remember a brush with death in Bosnia, while travelling in a convoy to a Muslim village being besieged by Serbs, who opened fire on us. In those situations you tend to either scream or pray. But I picked up my camera.
‘Concentrating on filming displaces you from what’s going on. There is nothing better at dispelling fear than having something constructive to do.
‘But then I couldn’t do anything except wait and it was unnerving. When I was working, the decision to go into a dangerous situation was a conscious one.
‘Now it’s different. My life is at risk and it’s not of my choosing.’
Sue was due to undergo a stem cell transplant six weeks ago, but the day before she was told her donor had failed his medical and the transplant could not take place — a rare occurrence she found ‘devastating and crushing’.
So she launched a quest to findd another suitable match and last weekk the BBC, in conjunction with blood d cancer charity The Anthony Nolan n Trust, set up a stand at Broadcastingg House in London to recruit neww donors. In all, 160 potential donors — both passers-by and BBC employees s — gave saliva samples, all sent for DNA analysis to ascertain their tissue type and add them to the donor register. Hundreds more registered online.
The appeal appears to have paid off. Last Thursday, while visiting Westminster Abbey with a group of Iraqi women about whom she’d been making a film, Sue learned that she had a donor. It almost seemed like divine intervention.
‘I’d been desperate enough to try anything and I touched the tomb of Edward the Confessor and lit a candle in the Abbey, then “ping’ went my phone.
‘It was a message from the hospital telling me they’d got a donor! I was overwhelmed with joy. I kissed the producer and cameraman and the Dean shouted “Hallelujah!”
‘I’m an agnostic, but I did think what a wonderful coincidence it was.’
Sue has her transplant in two weeks’ time. She is not allowed to know who her donor is, but will be writing a letter of thanks.
‘If he or she does want to meet me eventually, I’d love to give them a big hug. They have saved my life,’ she says.
It seems a fitting quid pro quo that Sue, whose work has helped so many, should now benefit from others’ altruism.
‘Without a transplant my outlook would have been dire,’ she says. She circumnavigates the word ‘death’ as if to use it would be to collude in the possibility that it could occur.
‘I don’t let myself dwell on the worst,’ she says. ‘I’m simply not prepared to confront it. I’m a great believer in mind over matter. “This can be sorted” is my motto, so I don’t indulge in unhappy thoughts about a premature end.’
Her family — husband Nick, 70, and children George, 34, and Sarah, 30, from her first marriage (neither was a donor match) — are similarly positive, but she concedes: ‘Although they are sensitive, loving souls and they know what’s happening to me, it’s very difficult for them.’
Her husband was with her when she first became ill in January. They were at the hotel they own and run on the Spanish island of Majorca — they bought it for their retirement project but ‘forgot’ to retire, she laughs.
‘I was loading the dishwasher when I collapsed with dizziness and nausea.
‘I’m a surgeon’s daughter and it was drummed into me never to bother the doctor, so for four or five days I didn’t.
‘Then Nick insisted I go for a check-up.
‘At A&E in the Spanish hospital they seemed a bit irritated that I’d turned up so long after the symptoms had gone, and I apologised. But they ran all the tests. Then, when the results came through ten days later, it was the doctor’s turn to be apologetic. He looked ashen. He seemed distressed and as I left, he shook my hand as if he was saying a final goodbye.’
SUE, it emerged, had myelodysplastia, a blood disorder that had developed into leukaemia, which affects 8,600 people in Britain each year.
‘I cried a lot,’ she recalls. ‘I was scared and it seemed so cruel, so unfair. I remember feeling indignant because I take care of my health: I eat a Mediterranean diet; my passion is hiking; I care about my weight and I don’t drink much.
‘Nick drove me home and he was, of course, distraught, but kept a stiff upper lip. He is also very practical, so it was: “What next?”’
Sue opted to return to London for treatment at University College Hospital; the proximity of her family — children and siblings — was also a comfort and she is now staying in her brother George’s elegant town house in Islington, where we meet.
Her demeanour is calm and composed. She looks, and feels, well. It is a surprise to see her conventionally dressed in colour-- blended separates, not rumpled in a flak-jacket. She wears a wig, a neat brunette bob, which suits her and looks so authentic I’d assumed, until she told me otherwise, it was her own hair. ‘ My hair fell out in clumps during the first bout of chemo,’ she says. ‘ The only good thing that’s come out of this is my wig.
‘Some unkind people have told me it looks better than the original!’
She has had two bouts of chemotherapy and so fragile was her immune system that she had to stay in hospital first for five, then six weeks of treatment.
Nick, currently in Majorca checking on the hotel, was at her side throughout. ‘He read me novels, which was lovely. We’re very brave for each other, although I suspect he does quite a lot of blubbing in private.’
Sue also worked on a book, The War On Women, writing about her work with women who’ve been persecuted.
The treatment over — with its dreadful vomiting and exhaustion — she was discharged just in time to celebrate Nick’s 70th birthday.
Serious illness, she concedes, has changed her. ‘I’ve grown much soppier. I cry more readily,’ she says.
It has opened her eyes, too, to the beauty of the everyday that she took for granted.
‘I often walk through Regent’s Park but now take in the full beauty of the roses. I’m getting more observant. I’m creating this bank of beautiful images, of mountains and sea; of nature and flowers, and I’ll draw on them when I’m in hospital.’
Her days of intrepid international reporting are, she concedes, probably over. I ask if, in a career rich in incident and accolades, she has regrets.
‘I’ve loved my work,’ she says, ‘but I’m not proud that it took me away from my children. I’m mightily relieved that they’ve forgiven me for being away and that we’re such good friends.’
And then she starts talking excitedly about grandchildren and the future. Clearly, Sue Lloyd-Roberts has no intentions of signing off any time soon.
People aged 16–30 can join the Anthony Nolan register at www.anthonynolan.org. To support their lifesaving work you can text SPIT60 to 70070 and make a £5 donation. or donate at www.justgiving.com/BBCPatientAppeal