I won’t stop banging on about cancer – it might save your life

IT STARTED so innocently for Stephen Fry. He’d gone to his doc for the winter flu jab. My husband, too. He’d gone about something equally mundane. But for both men, a routine visit led to follow-up tests and scans and left them staring into the abyss. Fry was diagnosed with ‘ an aggressive little bugger’ of prostate cancer. On Friday he released a 13-minute vlog about his treatment and recent prostatectomy, in which he refers to ‘the old feller’ or ‘todger’ and calls his prostate gland ‘chap’.

It’s all chummily Wodehousian, but you only have to look at his face to know it’s been a hell of a time.

My husband’s routine consultation ended with a diagnosis of hepatitis C, and cirrhosis of the liver. ‘It could mean liver cancer,’ his doctor warned, ‘and, well, you know…’

It was 1995 and my husband was 42. I had two small children and one on the way when we found out that his diagnosis could lead to cancer and, you know, curtains.

I must interrupt myself at this point to say that my husband loathes it when I dare to write about his own brush with death. ‘Go on, write about how my liver transplant was for you!’ he complains.

But I make no apology for banging on now, much as he will hate it. Because it saves lives. Stephen Fry’s banging on will mean thousands of men of a certain age will get themselves and their ‘chaps’ checked out, as a direct result.

Meanwhile, dozens of MPs went to the Commons on Friday specifically in order to bang on in the Organ Donation ( Deemed Consent) Bill debate. One Labour MP, Julie Elliott, banged on about her daughter Rebecca, who went, in a few months, from running marathons to not being able to walk down the street. She’s on dialysis, waiting for a kidney.

The good news for Rebecca – and the 6,500 others waiting for donor organs – is that it looks certain the law is set to change, so people will have to opt out if they don’t want their organs used after their deaths to help others live.

I only wish it had changed 15 years ago, before my husband was told he had cancer and needed a transplant. The worst part of our/ his ordeal was not the 11-hour op at Addenbrooke’s in Cambridge. It was the waiting. We/he waited for three long months. There were simply no livers available. My husband’s consultants told him to pray for ‘cold weather and black ice on the roads’, as the biggest source of donor organs was motorcyclists.

He is incredibly lucky that at the 11th hour, just as he was about to be removed from the list as unviable for transplantation, a suitable liver was ‘found’ – and my husband is still with us today as a result.

Stephen Fry admits he went around saying: ‘ Good heaven’s Stephen, you’re not the sort of person who gets cancer.’

But we all are. The sort of person who gets cancer. We will all come face-to-face with what Julie Elliott MP calls ‘the fragility of life’ and find this hard.

Last year, almost 500 people died awaiting a transplant. My husband got cancer and his life was saved by an organ donor. As Fry says: ‘It’s all very personal and undignified so I might as well bite the bullet.’

The least I can do in the circs is bite the bullet: make my bag of giblets available (ie not opt out) and I hope you will, too.