How DO you live your life when each day really could be your last?
Radio 4 presenter Steve Hewlett’s answer was with humour and unflinching honesty — and his broadcasts touched millions
DIAGNOSED with cancer last year, journalist and presenter Steve Hewlett decided to approach his battle with the disease the way he would deal with any other story — frankly and openly.
And so it was that over the past six months he shared the highs and lows of his treatment, both with listeners on BBC Radio 4 and in a series of articles in the Observer newspaper. The humour, warmth and honesty with which he reported on the day-to- day reality of living with cancer earned him a legion of fans.
In regular interviews on Eddie Mair’s PM programme he detailed the toll that radiotherapy and two rounds of chemotherapy treatment took on his body.
Ever upbeat, there appeared to be a breakthrough last month as he successfully applied to enter a trial for a new kind of immunotherapy drug.
He received his first doses of the drugs on January 19 but had to withdraw two weeks ago after his doctor told him that his liver had been too badly damaged by earlier treatments.
In a hastily arranged ceremony he married his partner, Rachel Crellin, at the Royal Marsden Hospital in Chelsea. He died there, aged 58, on Monday, with his three sons and other family at his bedside.
His aim in sharing his last days with the wider public, he said, was to help others who found themselves in a similar situation. Here the Mail shares a selection of Hewlett’s words and observations with which he charted the final months of his life.
ON HIS DIAGNOSIS
WELL, I have got cancer, I have got cancer of the oesophagus, near where the oesophagus joins the stomach. The tumour was discovered back at the very beginning of March. Prior to that, with hindsight, I can say I had some signs and symptoms.
What would happen is that I would eat half a banana, half a sandwich, which for me was unusual, and I would feel incredibly full. And that was it really. And then every now and again I would eat something that felt like it was getting stuck.
Not in my throat, but at the back of my chest. I can remember as a kid drinking fizzy pop and if you drink too much fizzy pop in too big a gulp you feel it in the back of your chest.
I then had a CT scan which revealed first of all that it was malignant, it was cancer, and also that it had spread to the lymph nodes on the liver.
IT SINKS IN
THE pressure of time I feel as a bit of a weight. I go away for the Easter Bank Holiday weekend and the thing that then happens is you start doing things and thinking I wonder if this is the last time I will do this. I wonder if this is the last time I will see this bit of the Cornish coastline?
It didn’t make me sad. It didn’t make me depressed. But it was always there.
HIS FIRST CHEMO
All the indications were that it was working for me. The scan after four cycles [of chemotherapy] was extremely good . . . the main tumour was in retreat.
I come to the end of my seventh cycle and it turns out it is not working at all. The chemo has simply now failed. The cancer is growing back.
So last week I went on holiday, to cut a long story short. I went to Oman and I sat on a beach. I went snorkelling. I went swimming. It was absolutely fabulous.
In one sense, nothing fundamental has changed. I still don’t know what is going to happen. My life is entirely uncertain.
ON RADIOTHERAPY
I’VE been a whole week on radiotherapy so I am sort of glowing in the dark. This is aimed at the main tumour. It is designed to give some symptomatic relief. It effectively shrinks the main tumour and pre prevents it blocking the oesophagus.
It is all very precisely calculated and if you start wriggling you are going to start irradiating things you don’t want irradiated. I did at one point get an itch under my glasses and I moved to scratch it and this voice came through and said: ‘Don’t move.’
GOING PRIVATE
SO WHAT to do? First estimate from the Marsden’s private patient unit, when you include ‘daycase’ fees for the treatment to be given along with the cost of the chemo drug, was — stand by — £15,624 per monthly cycle! Cue very sharp intake of breath from yours truly. Here’s the real paradox. I’m lucky in that I can probably afford this drug provided it’s not for too long. In other words, the sooner the treatment fails the happier my bank manager will be!
POSITIVE THINKING
THERE is one positive thing and it keeps on happening. I have lost, I reckon, 4 st plus and as a result whenever I meet people I haven’t seen for a while, they say: ‘Good lord, you’re looking well.’ Which is a funny way to start the conversation.
LIFE GOES ON . . .
DECIDED to go away to Devon and Dorset for the weekend to relax and ponder. Succumbed last night to glorious log fires and good food and, critically, two cocktails.
Big mistake! As my liver has plenty of active cancer in it, it can produce an ache under my right ribs if provoked. And while a pint or a couple of glasses of wine seems to be OK — a negroni and an old-fashioned weren’t.
CHRISTMAS CHEER
THE big day has arrived. Ordinarily, I’d help out with roasting the turkey and the traditional rib of beef. But the effects of the chemo were, unfortunately, very much in evidence. So I help out with the meat but can’t lift it out of the oven and have to sit down every ten minutes.
Presents are chaos, as always, but the undoubted star of the show is a video my boys made for me featuring contributions from much-loved friends, family and colleagues all over the world.
I’m welling up even as I write about it now. Anyhow, my favourite meal of the year, Christmas dinner with all the trimmings, beckons. I take a forkful and guess what? Wet cardboard!
As well as giving me fatigue, split fingernails and a sore mouth, the chemo has destroyed by ability to taste most things and reduced my appetite so severely that, over the Christmas week, I lose nearly two kilos.
But it’s a real disappointment not to be able to taste the moist turkey, rare roast beef and sprouts — overdone, just as I like them — and roast potatoes covered in lots of top-class gravy gravy. As I say — Sod’s law strikes again!
THE DRUG TRIAL
THIS is my first public appearance while consuming immunotherapy. It is an awful lot more easy to deal with so far, touch wood, than any of the chemotherapy. This may all change.
I could read you the list of potential side-effects. I have wondered on occasion, caught myself thinking, why am I so keen to get on a trial that has all these potentially fatal side- effects? But the upside of the side-effects is that they don’t happen very often. Or so I am re-assured.
LIVER TROUBLE
THE bete noir of my cancer, if that is the right term, really is my liver and their interpretation of what they can see is that the liver is misbehaving. The worse case scenario is that you can end up if you are not lucky with a liver that is so damaged that it is no longer capable of dealing with any further treatment.
It brings you up slightly short when you think about your liver getting to a point where it is no longer functional in dealing with the chemicals and the drugs you might need to survive.
This was the part of the process I think I have always said I was most afraid of, I wasn’t sure how actually ‘going’ would be, and I
still don’t know how actually ‘going’ would be, or dare I say, will be.
THE WEDDING
THE consultant, the amazing Dr Naureen came in and said: ‘Look, I’m really sorry about this, but your liver is playing up quite seriously, so much so that I don’t think as your clinician I could safely agree to treat you with anything.’
I said: ‘We have never talked about this before, but in terms of time scale, what do you think?’ Eventually she said: ‘Weeks, possibly months.’ It took a while for it to dawn on me what was really being said. She is saying that I could pop off at any time.’
Naureen says: ‘If you want to do this marriage thing, you should probably do it now.’ And the whole thing is organised within an hour. They got a Chelsea registrar, they got a Chelsea vicar hauled out of a dinner. There was this wedding scene right in this very room.
The nurses managed to produce bunches of flowers, a wedding cake, a couple of bottles of Prosecco appeared from goodness knows where and this ceremony begins.
It was like a combination of [the Sixties TV sitcom] All Gas And Gaiters and The Vicar Of Dibley. The idea that Britain doesn’t have people in it who care about other people and will go the extra mile when it matters is such nonsense. This is Britain at its best.’
LAST DAYS
IF YOU are told literally it is any day I don’t know quite how you go about living every day as if it is your last.
What do you do? Is this where you empty your bucket list? I think what I am looking for in that statement about living every day like it is your last is more kind of being able to relax, being able to enjoy, being able to watch TV, being able to spend time with friends.
That is what I look towards, I think. I’m not looking forward to racing through a list of things.
FUTURE HOPES
THE public reaction to the story [of my cancer] has been absolutely extraordinary. The sense of connection it has created with the audience I don’t think I have felt before.
Personally, I have to say it has been a pretty positive experience. My abiding hope is that it has been as positive an experience for people who have listened to it. But, Eddie, it’s not over yet, mate.
Words taken from interviews on BBC radio 4 and in Steve Hewlett’s column in the observer.