BREAST CANCER
WHEN Gina Dannatt was told she had as little as six months to live, her world imploded.
Having already gone through a double mastectomy, chemotherapy and radiotherapy, the news that it had spread to both of her lungs was too much to bear.
But that was 12 years ago. Now 61, Gina has outlived her doctor’s expectations and says she simply chose to live her life to the fullest for as long as she can.
“I felt numb when they told me,” says the grandmother from Biggleswade, Bedfordshire. “My arms and my face just went numb and I couldn’t get a breath properly.
“The end of the world happened to me in that minute. I was scared but I did go home and make my arrangements, I sorted my funeral and even picked a burial plot.
“Then one day I just felt I can’t do this and give in to it, throw everything away when I’m still here.
“Some people say to me it is because I’m so positive and, yes, I am a positive person but I’m not sure that is correct because I have had dear friends who have been so positive who have not made it. I really don’t know why I’m here. I’m just lucky.
“I get survivor’s guilt, where I’m still here and they’re not. It makes me feel bad and I don’t quite understand it all.”
To celebrate the life she has, and the wars her body has gone through, Gina bared all in an innovative campaign by the Pink Ribbon Foundation, where breast cancer survivors stripped off and were decorated by body painter and fine artist Filippo Ioco.
The pictures, for Breast Cancer Awareness Month, feature eight women, representing the UK’S one in eight who will suffer, and one man, symbolising the one per cent that are male.
In fact, last week Beyonce’s father Mathew Knowles, 67, revealed that he was diagnosed with breast cancer and their family carries the mutated BRCA2 gene that increases cancer risk.
Andrew Fowler, 64, was shocked when he was diagnosed with breast cancer in the year 2000 because he didn’t even know that men could get it.
The retired banker said: “I just never knew it was possible. And when I talked to my friends and family they never knew either.
“The first time I went to get the drug tamoxifen I went to a pharmacist. She said, ‘This isn’t for you, is it? You can’t have it, it hasn’t been approved for men’, which simply wasn’t true. Luckily I knew the law but if I hadn’t she wouldn’t have given it to me.
“I thought it was hilarious because all the literature was aimed at women. After the operation you have to do certain exercises, which are all designed for women, so I had to invent my own. It’s funny being a man in a women’s world because women have it tough in a man’s world so often.”
This was why he also decided to brave the photoshoot. “The shoot was great, we all had such a laugh and it was wonderful sharing stories,” he says. “You can’t be maudlin or morbid, you have to be constructive.”
That is the attitude of Laura Bailey, 37, too. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2017 with stage three inflammatory breast cancer that had spread to 11 of her lymph nodes. She had chemotherapy, radiotherapy and a mastectomy, but sadly in 2018 she was told it was now in her hip bones. She is incurable.
The mother of three, from Sutton, south London, says: “I have to keep that fact at the forefront. I can’t get into the idea that a