GOING through cancer can be a lonely, painful experience.
For one mum of two though, Dame Deborah James was a shining example of how to live with cancer, through the incredibly hard moments and the good.
Rebecca Scott, 43, a teacher from Ipswich was diagnosed with stage 3 bowel cancer at the age of 38.
Her only initial symptom was weight loss and then severe anaemia, around a month before her cancer diagnosis.
“I was losing so much blood constantly. I was running on half levels.
“I was told I basically shouldn’t have been functioning.”
She was eventually admitted to hospital with anaemia and sent on her way, the assumption being the blood loss was related to heavy periods.
But Rebecca wasn’t convinced and pushed for more tests.
After being dismissed by several doctors she finally got an answer for what was wrong: bowel cancer.
This all happened in 2018, around the time Debs was taking bowel cancer awareness mainstream, sharing her journey on Instagram and with Sun readers in her column Things Cancer Made Me Say.
As well as presenting the award-winning BBC podcast You, Me and the Big C with fellow cancer patients Rachael Bland, who passed away in September 2018, Lauren Mahon and Rachael’s husband Steve.
For Rebecca, Debs was the ultimate role model in speaking up about your health worries, sharing the good and the bad, and living brilliantly and vivaciously with cancer.
Rebecca said: “I wanted to acknowledge that, ‘Okay, this is what I’ve got, but this isn’t going to define me’.
“To see Deborah showing so much life despite her cancer resonated with me and she shone so brightly.
“She reminded me to live and was a huge support in navigating everything cancer throws at you.”
In 2018 Rebecca underwent surgery to have the right hand side of her bowel removed, as well as 43 lymph nodes and some tissue where the cancer had begun to encroach on her stomach and kidney.
“I was really lucky I didn’t wake up with a colostomy bag,” she says.
