Battling the Big C
Alex gave up university to care for a girl he’d been dating for 6 weeks. Theirs is just one of the awe-inspiring stories in a series that charts the tumultuous lives of cancer patients from the moment of diagnosis
MORE chairs have to be moved into the consult-ing room because there aren’t enough. All three of June’s daughters have come to support her, but the fear on their faces makes you question just who is in most need of support here.
Yes it is cancer, and yes it is bad. Yes they could operate, but the procedure is risky at June’s age — 83. Even if they do it, and she survives, there is a 50/50 chance that the can-cer could return within a year. But if they don’t? Then June will have months, a year tops, before this thing kills her.
Later, one of her daughters tries to explain what it feels like to get that news. ‘It’s like someone punching you in the stomach — a physical punch,’ she says, as they go home to break the news to June’s 17 grandchildren.
In a similar room, in another part of the country, the parents of nine-year-old Mikey are receiving their own pummelling, hit with every parent’s worst nightmare.
Mikey has an extremely aggressive brain tumour. There really is no debate here, as non-treatment isn’t an option. Yet even with treat-ment, he has only a 20 to 30 per cent chance of recovery.
Mikey has eight siblings. Only the older ones are told that he might die.
June and Mikey are the oldest and youngest contributors in a hard-hitting TV documentary series which follows Britain’s ‘ community’ of cancer sufferers over the course of a year. The Big C And Me, which starts tonight on BBC1, is one of the most ambitious documen-taries ever commissioned, throw-ing open the doors of cancer units and sufferers’ homes up and down the country.
Cameras were placed in doc-tors’ surgeries, sometimes capturing the moment patients hear the C word for the first time. Cameras followed those patients into MRI machines, and back to their homes, where they break the news to loved-ones.
Normally, these moments are intensely personal: in The Big C And Me we are able to share them. Nine people’s stories are told in-depth. Dozens more are filmed through fixed-rig cameras in chemotherapy suites.
Steve, a builder, is holding a meeting with his workmates about the need to reschedule some work. He has just been told he has prostate cancer and needs an operation.
Then there is Mark, who has a two-year-old son — and a cancer that is looking increasingly like it may be terminal.
The cameras are there at each consultant appointment, and at home as he baths his little boy and wonders openly if there is any chance of him still being around for his son’s first day at school.
And no one who watches will be able to forget Sally, a Welsh farmer’s wife who has spent ten years fighting cancer while raising five children.
On the day she’s going into hospital to undergo the bone marrow transplant that is her final chance, she takes the younger ones to school.
Because of the intensity of the treatment, it will have to be carried out in an isolation suite. She will not be able to see or touch her children for five weeks.
As the youngsters cling to her, she plays strong in their pres-ence, telling them not to cry and that of course Mammy will be coming home soon.
It is an astonishing programme — life-enhancing and even funny in parts, but in others almost unwatchable. This is reality TV at its most real — and it is unflinching.
Not all of those we meet make it through to the end of the filming. We, the viewers, watch children become orphans. The cameras are there at a funeral. The Mail has agreed not to reveal which of the participants survive and which tragically lose their lives to the disease.
Why, as someone who has just been diagnosed with cancer, would you consent to being part of such a programme, where you don’t get to dictate the ending?
Phoebe Pickering, 18, who discovered her cancer — a rare one, called a sarcoma, growing around her kidney then up towards her heart — in July last year, tries to explain. She admits that she was torn.
She had already undergone a nine-hour operation to remove her kidney, and had spent months in intensive care before she received the news that doctors felt she now needed to undergo intensive chemo, to remove any possible lingering cancer cells.
The chemo would continue for 12 months. The process would take her hair, her fertility, her chance of a normal life.
Oh, and would she consider going through this with a camera whirring in the background?
‘When we were approached, I thought long and hard about it,’ she says. ‘I sat and wrote lists of the pros and the cons.’
Ultimately, she decided that the ‘cons’ were too petty to influence her decision.
‘One of the things I was worried about was being filmed looking awful. Before the diagnosis, I was the sort of person who wouldn’t go to the corner shop without a full face of make-up.
‘Also, I was worried about having to keep on a brave face for the cameras. You know the way you automatically smile when a camera is pointed at you? Well, what if I couldn’t?’
In the end, though, the idea of showing the reality of a disease that is already affecting 11 million of us was too compelling.
‘I was scared, yes,’ says Phoebe. ‘But everyone is scared in this situation, and there was a bit of me that wanted to say, “Look, this is what happens”.’
At Phoebe’s side through filming — including when she had to fly to the States for pioneering proton radiation therapy — is Alex, her bear of a boyfriend.
Still only 18 himself, Alex had started to go out with Phoebe, a fellow pupil at his Brighton boarding school, just six weeks before she received her diagnosis. He was due to take up a place at St Andrews University. Incredibly, he turned it down so he could stay with her. Today, it’s something he shrugs off.
‘On the day I got my A-level results, Phoebe got word that she’d have to start chemo, possibly for up to a year, and we knew how hard it would be,’ he says. ‘How could I be up in St Andrews, so far away?
‘It’s not like I was throwing away the chance of ever going to university. I knew I could catch up with my studies. It was a sort of gap year, I guess.’
Phoebe says: ‘I don’t know what I would have done without him. He’s been there every step of the way. He pretty much moved in with us. There was none of this
Not all make it through to the end of filming ‘I was worried about keeping a brave face ’
“Let’s take things gently”, like there usually is when you start to see someone.
‘We bypassed all that. At the point where you are normally making all that effort, putting on extra make-up before you go out on dates, my hair was falling out. It was Alex who cut off the whispy, straggly bits for me. When I was feeling down and ugly and horrible, he would say, “I think you are great”.
‘I can’t say that I’d recommend trying to get a relationship going amid all this, but in a funny way I think we are stronger for it.’
Theirs is perhaps the most uplifting story to come out of this important series. The prognosis for their relationship must have been dire, but we watch them triumph.
Now, as they pose for our photo-graphs, they joke about their first Valentine’s Day, holed up in a hos-pital room in Florida following Phoebe’s radiation therapy. It was hardly conductive to romance, but Alex pulled out all the stops.
‘I wanted us to have a date night,’ says Alex, ‘even if she couldn’t leave the hospital. So I looked into how I could cook her something myself.
‘You weren’t allowed naked flames in her room, so I ended up bringing in a slow cooker with all the ingredients ready prepared. It wasn’t five-star dining, but it wasn’t awful hospital food.’
For 52-year- old Yvette Cowles from London, allowing the cameras to follow ‘every up, down and in-between bit’ was just the latest step in accepting that her cancer is ‘just part of my life’.
Yvette, a former marketing manager for a publishing house, was first diagnosed with breast cancer 21 years ago, with the disease spreading to her sternum, ribs and bones, despite a double mastectomy and various courses of radiation and chemo. Hers has been a precarious path, with every evidence of new cancer spots needing immediate decisions.
We meet her in the consulting room, with the doctors delivering yet more bad news. There is now evidence of cancer in her liver, as well as in the lungs and bones. Yvette is offered the chance of being included in a clinical trial — but is visibly upset at the idea of even having to make the choice of whether to say yes or no.
‘I think that’s the most tiring aspect,’ she says. ‘The having to make constant decisions — and life and death decisions at that. But for those of us who’ve lived with cancer for a long time, it’s just part of the deal.’
Yvette agreed to take part because she wanted to ‘break a bit of the silence’.
‘Things have changed in the past few decades. My mum had cancer five years before my first diagnosis, and she remembers friends actually crossing the street and neighbours scurrying inside so they didn’t have to face her.
‘With me, it wasn’t that bad — but people are still embarrassed. They don’t know what to say.’
She also wanted to get across the message that life doesn’t stop just because you have cancer.
‘In many ways, my life actually started. I gave up my very high-pressured job when I was first diagnosed, and I now teach belly-dancing.
‘Some of my classes are specifically for women who have cancer, and I can tell you that there is no better therapy. We all end up laughing our heads off.
‘ It’s terribly easy to become defined by your cancer, and I wanted to do this programme to show it needn’t be the case.’
For scientist-turned-trainee vicar Katy Garner, 52, filming couldn’t have come at a more bitter-sweet time. Her cancer — a recurrence of the melanoma she had survived back in 2009 — was diagnosed just a few days before her youngest daughter got engaged.
We watch Harriet’s wedding take place, just as Katy has had surgery and is preparing to embark on a clinical trial which will suppress her immune system and lead to months of illness and hospital admissions.
Indeed, when we do this interview, Katy, who lives in Bath, is in the Royal Marsden Hospital — which has become her second home. There is no longer any trace of cancer in her body, but the effects of the drug trial have been debilitating and there have been no end of complications.
Katy admits she was surprised to find herself becoming so emotional during the filming. ‘I had hoped I would be more controlled, but actually I found it terribly hard. There were so many points where I just wanted to run away.
‘Yes it was difficult timing, and there was something quite striking about it. The wedding was a wonderfully happy day. There is something magical about seeing your daughter starting this new chapter in her life, full of love and optimism.
‘I was happy for her. But I was scared for me, too. I remember sitting there and thinking “What about me? Is this it?” ’
There is precious little self-pity to be found in the contributors we speak to, however. All know that they are the lucky ones. The episode Katy appears in is dedicated to the memory of another Big C participant who didn’t make it.
‘That left me reeling,’ she says. ‘Because it could have been me. It could have been any one of us.’
The first episode of The Big C And Me is on BBC 1 at 9pm tonight.