“Don't leave things unsaid” – Dame Deborah James shared her personal thoughts on living with cancer, now captured in documentary
Hello, I am Deborah, otherwise known as Bowelbabe, and I live with stage 4 bowel cancer. I was diagnosed at the age of 35. So the thing that you need to know about any types of cancer is that you are never too young, and you don't really know how to get through each day. You don't really know how you're going to put one foot in front of the other, and somehow you do.
I have the old man's cancer, but I like high heels and glitter skirts as well as the next 35 year old, so it's breaking down those perceptions of what cancer looks like. I was surprised at how many days I spent horizontal, and nobody ever tells you that they give you steroids to counteract the side effects of chemo and it means that you can't sleep.
I was determined that I didn't want to look ill at all costs, so I upped my lipstick game, I upped my nail game. Even my husband was like, "Deborah you take better care of yourself now that you have cancer than you ever did," and actually it becomes like a self-fulfilling thing. So if I look in the mirror and I look like crap, I feel like crap, then if I suddenly put a face on, I suddenly feel a little bit better, and I think it's part of my coping strategy.
I knew the drugs were stopping working and everyone's like, "Oh no, that's a disaster", and I'm like, "It's not." My story's a really positive story, because I've done so much living in that two and a half years, it's quite phenomenal.A friend of mine, who sadly isn't here, he made me appreciate the rain. He was dying, not from cancer, from cystic fibrosis, and I saw him the week before he died.
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