I have incurable blood cancer, reveals UK’s top woman tech boss
‘Are you going to die?’
SHE is the most powerful woman in Britain’s tech industry, crisscrossing the world as the head of Facebook in Europe.
However, yesterday 46-year-old Nicola Mendelsohn revealed that she has secretly been fighting an incurable cancer for more than a year.
Married to a Labour peer and once named one of the top women in the country under 35, she has led a gilded life.
But despite her drive and success, nothing prepared her for the distressing task of having to tell her four children that she had follicular lymphoma.
Like most people, she had never heard of the blood cancer, which is more likely to afflict men over 65.
Telling her four children – aged 13 to 20 – was the hardest part of all, she said, adding: ‘Zac is our youngest and his first question was, “Are you going to die?”.
‘That’s always the thought that comes into your head when you hear the word “cancer”. It is not a conversation I could ever have imagined having with them, not even in my worst nightmares – until it hit me in the face.’
She promised them she would be honest about her illness and said they had coped well, telling her: ‘We take our cues from you, Mum. You seem to be doing all right with it, so we’re doing all right.’
Lady Mendelsohn, from Finchley, northwest London, has been Facebook’s vicepresident for Europe, the Middle East and Africa for five years. Her husband, Jonathan, was forced to resign from Labour’s front bench after attending the controversial Presidents Club dinner last month.
She said she was diagnosed after finding a lump in her groin. Although her blood tests were normal, a scan revealed ‘tumours up and down my body’. She added: ‘It was a terrible shock. I didn’t even feel ill. I kept thinking, “But I’m fit, I’m young”. It felt like a bad dream that I could still wake up from.’
Although follicular lymphoma can be treated with chemotherapy, it is incurable. However, 60 per cent of patients with lymphomas live for more than a decade.
It is a slow-growing cancer so, like many patients, she has opted for a watch-and-wait approach, avoiding the unpleasant side-effects of treatment for the time being. She said: ‘Your mind races off to the worst possibilities. Would I see my younger children reach adulthood? Would I meet my grandchildren? How long do I have?
‘Things you had taken for granted an hour earlier evaporate as your own mortality smacks you in the face.’
Fittingly, after being diagnosed in November 2016, she joined a Facebook group for sufferers and used her clout to push for research into a cure.
During the 14 months since her diagnosis, she has ‘tried to get my body in a better position’. She added: ‘I’ve given up processed sugar. I never used to exercise, but I am working out twice a week. It’s ironic, but I feel much healthier.’ And while having cancer hasn’t affected her ability to do her job, she has decided to avoid the ‘punishing’ routine of early morning flights.
Writing in The Sunday Times, she said: ‘I fly the night before now. I’m trying to be kinder to my body.’
She joined a fledgling Facebook group called Living With Follicular Lymphoma, which had around 200 members.
She has since become coadministrator, and membership has grown to 3,500 patients around the world.
It hosts live question and answer sessions with doctors, and works with researchers trying to find better treatments. A former advertising executive, in 2005 Lady Mendelsohn featured in Management Today magazine’s list of the top 35 women under 35.
Yesterday, she said her involvement had given her job with Facebook more meaning, adding: ‘I can see the power of feeling connected. This group has stopped all of us feeling alone with this disease.’
She needs annual tests to check whether her tumours are growing, but said her life was much the same.
But Lady Mendelsohn said her decision not to have treatment immediately ‘might well have been different if there were a cure’, adding: ‘That’s why I want to tell my story. I want to use my voice to help other people.’