REMEMBER the infamous remark by Leona Helmsley, the US hotelier and tax dodger, dubbed the “Queen of Mean”, who went to prison for tax fraud in the early Nineties after declaring to her housekeeper: “Only the little people pay taxes”? Well, here’s an equally obnoxious admission. Up until November last year, I thought only the little people got ill.
You will gather from this that I most emphatically did not consider myself one of the little people. For 49 years of my life, I had been blessed with good health. I had always ticked the “No” boxes on health questionnaires, never got coughs, never got flu. Even now, I have no idea what a migraine or a slipped disc or a really bad bout of gastroenteritis feels like. When my friends cough and splutter, or my nanny calls in sick, I have to feign a sympathy I don’t feel. “Poor you,” I gush through gritted teeth. “Go to bed, take some echinacea, put your feet up.”
Putting my feet up has never been my style, nor has downing costly herbal supplements. My energy levels are all my own work. People marvelled so often at my stamina (“I don’t know how you do it”) that I began to believe I really might be invincible. So when my insurance broker broached the subject of permanent health cover one day, I thought, “What, me? What for?” It seemed as pointless as playing the Lottery. Life insurance struck me as a similar waste of money — paying all those expensive premiums for years on end, only to live decades beyond one’s die-by date. Coming from a long line of nonagenarian females, I’ve always counted on making 100, plus a bit more besides.
Of course, I knew that it wasn’t all sweetness and life on the family front. My uncle and grandfather died of lung cancer, having puffed away all their adult lives. My mother developed colon cancer 12 years ago, but then she had lived with her symptoms for nine months before seeing a doctor, so we count it miraculous that she escaped with her life. When my sister developed a multicoloured mole on her upper back a few years ago, I told her to get it checked out, my suspicions alerted by the Cancer Research Campaign’s melanoma awareness drive. She saw her GP that same week and rang me a fortnight later to say the biopsy had revealed it to be a malignant melanoma.
Phew, close shave, I thought. It reinforced my philosophy that if you stay vigilant, you’ll be OK. I carried on having regular smears, breast checks and “well woman” screens. I had given up smoking 23 years ago, drank strictly in moderation, clocked up at least 30 minutes of aerobic exercise three times a week. I was never obsessive, but I was, in health lingo, supremely “health-aware”.
So it was a shock of seismic proportions to find out last November that not only was I ill — something I had rather suspected after living with a sharp, unexplained pain in my right side, two months of persistent headaches, a cough that refused to resolve and four very uncharacteristic return trips to my GP — I was very ill indeed. I had Stage Four cancer of the lung (there is no Stage Five), which means that it had spread beyond the chest wall, taking up residence in my lymph glands and bones. While most sufferers find a cancer in some outlying part of their body, have treatment and cross their fingers for the five-year all-clear, I had fast-forwarded to the far end of the cancer continuum — you know, the bit where they stop talking about percentage chances of cure and start talking about “management” and “quality of life” instead.
The irony of my particular situation was immediately apparent to everyone who knows me. Not only am I — was I — the healthiest woman on the block, a runner of half marathons, yoga devotee and nutrition nut, I have spent my professional life advising people how to stay well. It’s my job. I have been writing about women’s health for more than a quarter of a century, first as health editor of Vogue and then for a range of newspapers and magazines, and am the published author of not one, but four books about preventative health.
If my pride was dented, my faith in my body was even more so. How could I have failed to pick up a single symptom? How could I have been harbouring a primary tumour in my lung — for four or five years, according to my consultant — and not have had a clue of its existence when running up the hills on Hampstead Heath? It certainly made a total nonsense of the comprehensive health check I’d had back in July, with its supposedly “clean bill of health”.
If it was the end of my world as I knew it, it was also, without wanting to slide into the clichéd triumph-over-tragedy cancer narrative, the beginning of a personal and professional journey.
At the age of 49 and a half, it was rather late in the day for me to learn humility. But I realised that my superior healthier-than-thou attitudes could do with some close examination. We can all attempt to spruce up our lifestyles and so hope to swing the odds of having a long and active life in our favour. But at the same time we need to have the humility to recognise that there are no prizes — certainly no guarantees — for good behaviour. Life is uncertain, health is not a given, or even, sadly, an earned.
As my personal perspectives have shifted, so have my professional ones. In the mid-Eighties, when all the glossy magazines were uncritically embracing anything New Agey and unorthodox, and doctor-bashing had become a national sport, Vogue’s health coverage, which in those days stretched to six or seven pages an issue, remained resolutely mainstream. I was a friend, not a foe, of the medical profession. One of the highlights of my career was having a piece I had written on breast cancer cited in a Lancet editorial by a professor of oncology at the Royal Marsden, the country’s leading cancer hospital.
As a fully paid-up member of the sceptics’ party, I was suspicious to the point of dismissiveness about quack cures. Their anecdotal stories of miraculous remissions and doctordefying recoveries were, I believed, a short step away from believing in extraterrestrials. Quack illnesses — “reactive” hypoglycaemia, food intolerances, candida yeast infections, mercury “toxicity” from amalgam fillings — received equally short shrift, as did anything purporting to treat them, from dowsing with pendulums to crystal healing.
BC — before my cancer — I prided myself on being able to sniff out a charlatan at 100 paces. I was a founder member of the Campaign Against Health Fraud. Press releases proclaiming the powers of wacky remedies were consigned to the bin faster than you could say “bullshit”. In those days, I was convinced that I was protecting my reader from cruel rip-offs preying on the hopes and fears of desperate, vulnerable, sick people. Now I am a desperate, vulnerable, sick person myself, however, I am beginning to find myself strangely drawn to stories of people who were “given” three months to live, swallowed shark’s fin cartilage and went on to celebrate their silver wedding anniversaries.
