There are three facts in that sentence and only one is false (‘billionaire’, I checked and his net worth is actually about $400million, so the cost-of-living crisis must be pretty hard on him). He is definitely a weirdo and he did receive a blood plasma transfusion from his teenage son, Talmage, in 2023.

However, that’s not what I’m saying I was wrong about. I thought Bryan Johnson was doing all this because he thought he was above dying.

And, to be fair, that would make perfect sense. Death is the one thing rich people still can’t buy their way out of. You can buy the yacht, the private jet or eggs during a supermarket shortage. You can also buy the personal chef, the personal trainer and the best health MOTs that money can buy. That can help you live healthier and therefore give you a better shot at living longer, but eventually you die just like the rest of us.

So when an extremely rich man starts spending millions of dollars a year measuring his organs, eating dinner at 11am and trying to make his 40-something-year-old body function like an 18-year-old one, it’s not entirely my fault that I thought he was just couldn’t come to terms with Memento Mori.

Plus, there is also something inherently villainous about a man trying to conquer death.

We just don’t tend to trust people who want to live forever - just look as some of the most famous stories. Dorian Gray trades natural ageing for a portrait that becomes increasingly grotesque in its place. Frankenstein meddles with life and death and, famously, it does not go particularly well. In Greek mythology, Tithonus is granted eternal life but not eternal youth, leaving him to age forever. For centuries, people chasing elixirs of life and other ways to cheat death have been portrayed as fools or narcissists.

Defying death sounds greedy and unnatural. Like you’ve looked at the one rule that applies equally to every human being who has ever existed and decided that, actually, it shouldn’t apply to you. As Gavroche said: “Here is a thing about equality: Everyone’s equal when they’re dead.” So why do you believe you are above everyone else?

Which is why Bryan Johnson is so easy to ridicule, and why I was part of that bandwagon. A very rich man announcing that he intends to “Don’t Die” sounds like an antagonist, not a protagonist.

Except the more I’ve watched Bryan Johnson, the less I think that’s what this is, because I found out about Kate. Kate Tolo is Bryan Johnson’s girlfriend, and he is obsessed with her.

It’s inconvenient for the caricature I had in my mind of a cold, sinister tech man trying to outsmart the Grim Reaper, because Bryan Johnson appears to be completely and utterly in love.

The way he talks about Kate is totally endearing. He tweets about her, admitting that he is willing to put his protocols aside to meet her parents, because he really, really loves her. Or say that missing her might be the thing that finishes him.

He’s as open about his adoration for her as he is about his nighttime erections and bowel habits. He announced to the internet that Kate had scored 100/100 for her vaginal microbiome, apparently putting her in the “top 1% of all vaginas”. He seemed chuffed. Go on, I know you’re saying ‘awww.’

Anyway, I started paying more attention to him - sue me, I love a soppy dude -and, annoyingly, I kept finding things I liked.

Including the fact that Bryan and Kate are on a journey towards undiscovered areas of women’s health, beating researchers and governments.

Kate is attempting to become what they describe as ‘the most measured woman in history’, with millions of data points being collected across her menstrual cycle in an attempt to develop a female-specific longevity protocol. She has a dedicated medical team, uses dozens of devices, and her daily schedule includes 100 measurement tasks.

Women are comparatively poorly understood medically, as female bodies have historically been underrepresented in research. I read Unwell Women a few years ago, and there is actually a fascinating historical reason for some of this that isn’t simply misogyny. For centuries, much of what doctors learned about human anatomy came from dissecting cadavers, and in Britain the few bodies legally available were often those of executed criminals. These were overwhelmingly men, because men are awful far fewer women were executed for murder. A menstruating or pregnant female cadaver was harder still to come by, obviously. So medical knowledge quite literally developed around the male body. There was, of course, also misogyny.

Anyway, let’s go back to the present day, which is still very patriarchal.

Except now we have the weirdo billionaire multi-millionaire’s girlfriend!

And they’re sharing what they learn with the world. FOR. FREE.

Because as it turns out, Bryan Johnson doesn’t seem remotely interested in keeping what he learns to himself so he can outlive us peasants. He’s his own guinea pig, and he publishes his data. He shares his protocols, even though they are objectively ridiculous and hilarious. He talks endlessly about what works, what doesn’t and what he’s changed his mind about (much like me in this essay).

There are lots of things I think extremely wealthy people should be spending their money on: poverty, climate change, medical research, while plenty seem more interested in funding egotistical projects or bullying trans folk online. Oh, side note, another thing about Bryan is how he says his longevity protocol is for ‘all genders’ in the promotional video. Nice, Bryan.

So trying to understand how humans can live longer, healthier lives seems pretty noble in the grand scheme of things.

I do want to say here that while I’m increasingly fascinated by longevity, I’m actually pretty against the idea of immortality. I don’t think death is a design flaw we need to engineer out of the human experience, and I’m not convinced living forever would make us happier. I have an entire other essay brewing on that, so I’ll spare you my existential crisis for now - I’ve revisited Stoic philosophy and spent too many hours in hospital waiting rooms. Cancer does weird things to me. Actually, ‘weird’ is a shit word to use in the great scheme of this essay.

But longevity and immortality are very different things. Wanting humans to live forever is one thing, but wanting us to spend more of the years we already have healthy, mobile and cognitively sharp is different. And the latter is much harder for me to argue against.

Do I want Bryan Johnson to figure out how to keep me healthy until I’m 95? Absolutely. Do I want him to figure out how to keep me alive until I’m 295? Well, watch this space for my thoughts on that.

There is something wonderfully authentic about him too: not showing off his material wealth as such, just his biomarkers. He’s not chasing 25-year-olds like Leonardo; he’s supporting winding back the clock on his age-appropriate girlfriend… within reason, as per below. Lol.

And the other thing I got wrong about him is that I assumed this was all vanity, which it clearly isn’t, because he has voluntarily become one of the strangest men on the internet.

Another quick side note: I notice he hasn’t even pulled any tech strings for his Instagram handle, needing a _ after his name because the simple version was already taken. Compare that to Zuckerberg, who obviously owns @zuck. Bryan apparently draws the line at using his tech powers to steal someone’s Instagram username.

He’s obviously obsessive and takes things to the extreme, but I’ve stopped seeing him as a man desperately trying to preserve Bryan Johnson and more as someone genuinely interested in preserving humans.

In a world where extremely rich people so often use wealth to separate themselves from everybody else - private islands, private planes, plastic surgeons who would never take a cold call - Bryan Johnson is using his to investigate the one thing he can never escape having in common with us: a human body that ages. And falls in love.

He’s also intentionally funny, not just eccentric, and I’ll put some videos below. He follows 28 people on Instagram and one of them is Paris Hilton. He made an account for his dog.

So maybe I got vanity and humanity mixed up, and I am thrilled I’ve had my mind changed, much like my opinion of Nara Smith.

He’s still a weirdo, though.

See below:

The phrase ‘social media diet’ is being bandied around for people trying to be extra conscious with what and how much content they ‘consume’, and I’m all for it. The thing is, we aren’t just ‘spending less time on our phones’, we are actively using hacks to try and reduce it: buying a Brick, setting app timers, and using Focus modes.

This isn’t screaming social media ‘diet’, it’s telling me that we need actual tools to help us, and currently we don’t have any available on prescription so we’re making our own.

I’m all for Ozempic. I have friends on it who are feeling like their happiest and healthiest selves, and who have also stopped beating themselves up about not being able to stick to diets through willpower alone.

Because, of course, with bodies evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to maximise survival, how could resisting hunger and highly palatable food in an environment of abundance ever be entirely straightforward?

For years, we’ve attacked obese people for lacking ‘willpower’ while ignoring how powerfully their biology and environment can work against them.

And I think we’ve made exactly the same mistake with social media.

For most of human history, food was scarce. For most of the internet’s history, the internet was scarce too - and by that, I mean inconvenient. You had to go to a computer, sit down, log on and eventually log off, even telling your friends ‘g2g’.

And now, social media is designed and manufactured to keep us engaged: to keep us scrolling, to keep us clicking, to keep us from ever being bored, as I wrote about in my recent post. So when we try to lower our screen time - much like when we try to diet - we fail. Temptation is all around us: in our fridges and in our pockets.

Then we feel shitty about it, despite that temptation being masterminded by some of the brightest platform nerds in Silicon Valley. After all, 51% of all UK online time is spent on services owned by Alphabet or Meta.

So we need to stop labelling temptation as a character flaw and start our own Online Ozempic. There are the obvious ones I briefly mentioned above, but I’ve also found some new - and occasionally unhinged - ways to help.

Audiobooks…on 1.5x speed

Hear me out.

When I was in the depths of chemo brain fog, I stopped being able to read books. My attention had been waning anyway due to gestures to fucking everything, and the extra poison in my body made reading impossible, which was devastating as I’d always adored it.

I’m not into podcasts because I always get distracted, but I downloaded an audiobook and, to stop my mind wandering, revved up the speed. I watch videos on 2x speed because I am clearly hungry for content, and it turned out that ‘consuming’ a book faster worked too.

And you can’t really scroll social media at the same time, because then you miss a sentence and have to rewind.

I listened to All My Mothers, London Falling, and got halfway through Yesteryear before it was chosen as my Book Club read, at which point I bought the hardback and finished it that way.

I haven’t needed to do it again. I’m back reading, and have read five more since!

Turn your phone OFF and nap

This sounds offensively simple, but turning my phone completely off before I nap has been weirdly effective. Instead of waking up and seeing a wall of notifications that makes you instantly open the apps, you wake up to…nothing!

Obviously I don’t want to be unreachable for too long, but even going about my day for an extra ten minutes before turning it back on has done wonders.

You get this tiny buffer between being unconscious and being immediately reabsorbed into the digital world, which is something you can’t usually do in the morning due to Monday-Friday alarms and weekend WhatsApp plans.

Using Emergency Bypass

We’ve all had our phones on silent for the last decade, so I get it, if we leave our phones, we don’t know who is trying to contact us. Does it matter? Well, I found out after my cancer diagnosis that it most certainly did.

When I was Prime Minister Pitt of Despair, I would emerge from pillows absorbing my tears to discover that the hospital had rung me, which made me Pitt the Even More Despondent.

So I used the Emergency Bypass feature on my iPhone for the first time in my life (looking back, I really should have had it switched on for my parents before this, sorry Mum and Dad) so I would never miss an important call again.

But I’ve since realised it’s also a bloody great feature for getting away from your phone, because you really aren’t missing anything important.

Calm app

I started this during my period of stress in the last couple of years. I was sceptical but was desperate for anything to get my heart rate down and help me sleep. And it really works!

Meditations get me so present in my own body in the physical world that I fully switch off from the digital one. And although I’m still struggling with sleep due to all of my cancer medication, the sleep stories do help.

Put one on instead of scrolling for the final few minutes of your waking day and you’ve achieved the easiest nighttime digital detox imaginable.

Walk somewhere with no headphones and your phone in your pocket

You can do it! I hate to be cliche, but: look at the sky! Look who is driving the cars and guess where they are going. Look into shop windows - or just look at your reflection. Think about your day.

Become aware of your breathing, because being alive is truly a gift (told you I was going to get cliche, but I’m a cancer patient so you have to let me).

Add friction

I’ve realised the tiniest inconvenience can be enough to interrupt the muscle memory. I can’t log out of Instagram - well done to all those who can, or who can delete it and just use desktop - but I can move it off my home screen. That way, my thumb doesn’t automatically click it when I exit WhatsApp.

And, of course, charge your phone somewhere you can’t reach it from bed - even if it’s just putting it in your bedside drawer. Out of sight, out of mind, literally.

None of these things are revolutionary, and some are frankly ridiculous. To people who don’t have an internet addiction, it must sound like I have a serious problem. And I do! And I’m trying really, really hard.

Much like going to Infernos and trying not to make a bad decision, having social media in my pocket and trying not to let it consume my life is almost impossible.

And that’s why I’m increasingly unconvinced that the answer is simply to ‘have more willpower’. We’ve taken a human brain that fucking loves novelty and given it an infinite supply of it, engineered by some of the cleverest people in the world to be difficult to put down, then decided we’re the problem when we can’t put it down.

So let’s make peace with our consumption-obsessed brains and use those exact brains to build some barriers between us and the infinite supply.

Digital detox? I need OnlineOzempic™.

And it unlocked a memory I hadn’t had in years, but might just have been a billion dollar business if we had kept it open.

Growing up, we went to France together as families every summer. Two glorious weeks of Scrabble, sandcastles, sailing… and stately homes. Being dragged round yet another château bored us to tears, and the only way we managed to get back at our parents was by creating a sketch-style ‘performance’ of the same name, ridiculing the ‘oldies’ for making us endure tours of another dead aristocrat’s furniture. In fact, maybe it was the spectacles of inherited wealth eating into blue-collar sandcastle building time that made me such a socialist. Perhaps us kids should have unionised.

Anyway, this new noun became family lore - we’d describe any non-hands-on museum as ‘such a Château de Boredom’, while my parents’ activity list continued to keep the National Trust in business.

Izzy’s message brought it all back. There I was again, a tween in sandals and Malabar tattoos, being taught about 18th-century ceilings with only a Polly Pocket and a scrap of paper for Noughts and Crosses in my bum bag. I was, frankly, so fucking bored.

And yet now, Château de Boredom sounds expensive.

See what I mean? There would be a waiting list - because it’s already what people pay money for on wilderness-style retreats.

And I’m not about to launch into another digital detox type essay (although I have one coming), as it’s not just phones I’m talking about. I’m talking about the very essence of luxury: scarcity. For most of history, wealth meant having access to things. Now that access is increasingly democratised, wealth is starting to mean having the ability to refuse them.

Of course, choosing to go without is nothing new. People have fasted despite having access to food for thousands of years, for religious, spiritual and cultural reasons. What feels newer is the way voluntary deprivation has been repackaged as aspiration.

A Birkin bag, original art, a naturally symmetrical face - all coveted, all difficult to obtain. Which is where we are at with boredom. We actively have to seek boredom, instead of relieving it like generations before us, which is what makes it so undeniably luxurious, so we should embrace the status symbol, and treat it like the aspiration it is.

Entertainment used to have an end. A newspaper had a back page, an album ran out of songs and a television programme finished. Infinite scroll has removed the finishing line. You can't ‘finish’ Instagram or complete TikTok; the next thing arrives before you've had a chance to wonder what to do next. Boredom used to live in the gap between one thing ending and another beginning. We've designed the gap out.

You don’t get bored of your wardrobe because one click gives you a new, affordable outfit, ready to wear tonight if you press the button before lunchtime - grotesque, but the ease still exists. You don’t get bored of the same dinner because our supermarkets have 100s of ingredients our grandparents couldn’t pronounce, and Deliveroo has 1000s more. If I had got bored of the three books I’d taken on holiday in the 2000s, I’d spend the remaining fortnight reading a sun cream bottle, but now if the thriller doesn’t hook me by page four, I have 2000+ options on my Kindle. Hell, even people bored of a conversation on a dating app can swipe through one hundred more faces in a mere minute.

Last year, one writer I know - the incredible Izzy (not the same Izzy) Lewis - posted that she had stopped wearing headphones to exercise, walk, or sit on public transport. My response was, of course, ‘OMG’, asking her what she did instead - offering up ‘eavesdrop’ as my only activity to fall back on. Izzy told me she would just “think a lot of the time. After never allowing myself to think.”

I was shook. Living rent free in my own head sounded impossible back then, but I have spent a good few months trying to consciously make it possible. So thank you, Izzy. I have started to do my near-daily walk home from Holland Park or the hospital headphone-free to try and instil some boredom into me. And your brain starts doing stuff when you stop giving it stuff to do.

I notice people’s outfits. I’ve noticed the leaves starting to change colour, even in July. The other day I mentally drafted a thank-you letter to my uncle for taking me for dinner. And I come up with Substack ideas. I came up with this article!

Because as children, boredom bred imagination. My brother and I had a game called ‘the boat game’, which consisted of putting all our cuddly toys onto a duvet in one of our bedrooms and slowly inching the duvet across the landing because, in our heads, we’d been shipwrecked and had to get everyone to safety - which was always New York. I have absolutely no idea why - I don’t think we even knew what Ellis Island was - but maybe château-repellent wealth-distributing child-Anna had already heard about Zohran Mamdani.

And those very basic human urges - to make up a story because there isn’t one, to invent a game because there isn’t one, to perform because there is nothing else to watch - are the same ones that, over hundreds and thousands of years, have given us literature, theatre, music and sport.

Of course, boredom is still a luxury in the traditional sense. Being able to be bored means that, in that moment at least, you’re probably not hungry, scared or preoccupied with how you’re going to survive the day. There are millions of people who don’t have the luxury of having nothing to worry about except having nothing to do.

And it’s a luxury because it’s difficult to obtain. We have to make very conscious decisions to become bored. It’s exclusive. It requires effort. Entire industries have been built to make sure you never have to experience it.

Manufacturing scarcity might sound like Marie Kondo has won. But my childhood got there first - Château de Boredom was luxury travel before luxury travel knew it. I spent it begging to go back to the pool. Now I’d give my non-cancerous breast for three nights of a dead aristocrat’s ceiling and zero Wi-Fi.

I never really formed a proper opinion on the so-called tradwife influencer. I didn’t dislike her, and her over-the-top outfits while stirring sourdough often felt more like caricature than instruction, almost holding up a mirror to the absurdity of tradwifery rather than genuinely selling it. Besides, her whole existence is a paradox: she's one of the biggest influencers on the internet with a hugely successful business. She's not a housewife; she's a businesswoman playing one online.

If I’m being completely honest, I was probably just jealous. She’s younger than me, prettier than me, thinner than me, infinitely wealthier than me, and somehow has a husband who looks like he was carved out of marble. Oh, and I’m a hopeless baker.

Anyway, it was knowledge of her existence rather than actually following her that made me stop scrolling when her announcement video landed on my Reels feed, telling the world that her two-year-old daughter, Whimsy, had been diagnosed with cancer.

Her slow, careful voice suddenly sounded vulnerable and heartbroken instead. Of course it did. This is one of the worst pieces of news a mother can ever receive. I know that because I still remember my own mum’s face after I told her I had breast cancer at 33.

Firstly, I know first-hand just how devastating a cancer diagnosis is for the whole family. No matter how perfect or privileged your life appears, the fear is the same. Nara, Lucky and Whimsy have all shown remarkable courage.

Secondly, what surprised me was her speaking so openly about her daughter’s chemotherapy in the same video, and I commend her for it. One of the frustrating corners of social media my algorithm serves me is dangerous misinformation about how CBD oil and fasting can cure cancer, urging patients to tell their doctor that they’re skipping traditional treatment. If you’d asked me before watching Nara’s video where those ideas might overlap online, I’d probably have guessed somewhere in the followers of her perfectly curated, holistic kitchen.

By going public with Whimsy’s diagnosis - which, judging by the comments asking how a child whose mother makes everything from scratch could possibly develop cancer, was desperately needed - Nara has flung cancer from her beautiful, aspirational world into the real one. In doing so, she’s become living proof that you cannot sourdough your way out of cancer.

But more importantly, by going public with her daughter’s treatment plan, she has quietly endorsed science-backed medicine. She didn’t tell her millions of followers that the answer was hidden in a supplement, a detox or a secret holistic protocol.

She spoke of how she and Lucky took her to the ER, then the pediatrician, then the children’s hospital. She spoke about X-rays, ultrasounds, and a biopsy to get to the diagnosis. She shared a photo of an MRI machine, and spoke of her heartbreak about Whimsy losing her hair from the toxicity of chemo. I’d assumed from the endless anti-vaxxers and conspiracy-theorist talking-heads who reject modernity meant anyone who embraces tradition goes down the alternative medicine route too. I got it so wrong.

To be clear, I still think raw milk is a terrible idea and homemade sunscreen is an even worse one. Admiring someone's response to one of the hardest moments of their life doesn't require endorsing every other opinion they hold.

I’ve spoken previously about how you can do everything right and still get cancer, and Whimsy’s story is one such tragic example of that. But Nara has also shown something equally important: you can do everything right after a diagnosis too. You can trust doctors. You can choose evidence over ideology. You can sit beside your child through chemotherapy because, however brutal it is, it’s the treatment giving them the best chance.

Nara didn’t have to share any of this. I don’t believe she did it for clicks - in fact, if anything, it disrupted the polished world she’d built online. And that’s exactly why it matters.

Instead, she says in the news video that she hopes her openness will bring “comfort,” or “incentivise you to go get something checked out that you’ve been avoiding.” This truly could be life-saving.

Then she posted a clip explaining how Whimsy is in remission, and acknowledges “how expensive medical care is and what a toll it takes on families,” directing followers to charities to support others. I hold my hands up and admit that I judged her far too harshly.

Anyway, I’ve pressed follow and I now look forward to her recipes that I’ll glance at while still struggling with my pitifully raw brownies and cremated cookies. Modern medicine and traditional baking were only ever mutually exclusive to me, not to Nara.

If her honesty persuades even one sceptical family to trust doctors over influencers, chemotherapy over conspiracy theories, then Nara Smith will have done something infinitely more important than go viral. She’ll have helped save lives, and that’s an extraordinary legacy.

Anyway, my pillow has already absorbed most of the sobs, so instead of dwelling, I thought I’d add a few more entries to my ever-growing list of the tiny, ridiculous positives to come out of this whole malignant mess.

Weirdly good skin on chemo

Ok, so this is purely anecdotal, but many others have said it too! During chemo, our skin was wonderfully clear and smooth. Perhaps this is from the extra care we took with it, but also a quick research indicates it could be because it’s less oily due to slower cell turnover, less inflamed due to steroids, and less hormonal due to our hideous endocrine medication. Whatever the reason, there’s something wonderfully glamorous about crying your eyes out with flawless skin.

Playing with new hairs

I don’t gnaw the skin around my fingers when I’m anxious anymore. Instead, I absent-mindedly stroke the tiny not-so-bald-anymore patch above my right ear. It’s so immensely satisfying. Can’t wait until I can plait it.

Look! My baby hairs are now toddler hairs!

More anniversaries

Birthdays and Christmas are fabulous, but I now have even more dates to mark on my calendar! A pink-themed pub session to commemorate diagnosis day - the scariest day of my life so far! Perhaps a new bra to mark the day I said goodbye to my left breast tissue! Perhaps a cake to blow out a year on from the day I rang the bell! There are no rules!

Speaking of…the joy of ringing the bell

Honestly, how many people get to experience that? It’s this wonderfully strange milestone: unique enough to feel special, but common enough that an army of people instantly know exactly what it means. We’re always chasing a sense of achievement, but instead of training for a gruelling marathon, we just sit in a chair for a few months, and people still congratulate us as much. ‘Just’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

No need to pay for a pricey Neko scan

They’re all the rage, aren’t they? Comprehensive blood tests, health MOTs and time with specialists that my friends are suddenly paying hundreds for now we’re all in our thirties. Meanwhile, I’ve had bloods taken almost every week for months. Liver, kidneys, white blood cells, you name it. Any random ache can go straight onto Queen Victoria’s list at my next appointment. I’ve had my heart scanned. I’ve got a bone density scan coming up. I’m as monitored as Bryan Johnson’s girlfriend, except nobody knows my vaginal microbiome report.

Acquiring the world’s comfiest wardrobe

Weight fluctuations and general fatigue has me embracing elastic, and I love it.

Having a new specialist subject

I’ve written before about all the new words I’ve learnt. But it keeps going. I now know what hormones actually do (and exactly why I miss mine), how different chemotherapy drugs work, why certain medications interact, how lymphatic systems behave, and what neutrophils are. I don’t even skip the health pages in the news anymore, and I’ve even made a couple of tiny investments in pharmaceutical companies developing new cancer treatments. One of them is up 130%. Imagine telling pre-cancer me that I’d become an oncology enthusiast!

You get proof that you can do something you were convinced you couldn’t

Before treatment, chemo felt unimaginable. Then it turned into something almost mundane, then something I completed. Even if you are lucky enough to not need chemo, the same can be said for surgery, radiotherapy, and other treatments.

It’s a strange gift to be given, but once you’ve done something you were utterly convinced you couldn’t, it’s very difficult to underestimate yourself ever again. And you have the scars to prove it!

I’ve always been prone to it, but last year took it out of me. I couldn’t switch off from the horrors of the world, I felt like I was failing at work, and I was having serious freak-outs about my future. Well, that’s also ironic. Luckily, I had a holiday planned, so thought some annual leave would give the knot in my stomach a break. Little did I know the lump on my breast wasn’t planning to take such a chill pill, as I found out about my serious diagnosis just days after my return.

But if it wasn’t for that stress and subsequent hair loss, perhaps I wouldn’t have flagged the cancer until much, much later. It was a grade 3 tumour that had taken every opportunity to spread from the main site. So maybe it was a blessing that my vanity frog-marched me to the doctor.

All of which is to say: my hair is very important to me. But that’s not unique - pretty much every cancer patient says the same. Identity, beauty standards, or just not wanting to look sick: all valid.

After far too many hours on Reddit, social media, and a Facebook group dedicated entirely to cold capping, I learnt that my chemotherapy regimen (AC-T) was one of the worst for hair loss. Still, I was determined to give my follicles a fighting chance… and I’m bloody thrilled with the results. Yes, I have all-over thinning and my ear went bald, but pretty much nobody would notice. I was blessed with thick hair beforehand, so luck was on my side, but I also did absolutely everything I could. Here’s the rundown.

This comes heavily dripping in disclaimer: this is simply what I did, not what you should do. I don’t know whether my hair retention was down to any of this, or luck, or both, and results vary enormously. But I would have wanted to read this exact post six months ago.

The cold cap

What a bloody revolutionary invention. Without it, I’d have nothing. Everything else I did was simply to make the cold cap more effective.

As tight as possible is the key. I have quite a big head - both physically and metaphorically - yet wore the small, which didn’t quite reach my ears but it still got my scalp thoroughly frosty. In the first session, I think I was so anxious that I held my head uncomfortably on the back of my chair to really press it down further on my scalp. My neck ached so I didn’t do it again, but I did always feel some air bubbles that I could press on which concerned me but clearly ended up fine - so don’t panic if you get the same.

Lots of patients put a sanitary pad on their forehead to ease the discomfort, but I didn’t need it. I was also told to take paracetamol for the pain and suck a sweet, but found I could skip both. I just wetted my hair as much as possible before wearing it to make sure it would freeze.

My consultation at the Daniel Field clinic recommended using old tights to tie around the hairline to tighten, which I did. Their starter kit also includes a chicken fillet - you place it over the blue frozen cap before putting the outer cap on, adding extra pressure at the parting, and that seemed to work for me.

I also had the strap pulled so tight under my chin that I needed to yank away to talk, or when Judy the volunteer/full-time legend brought me a tuna sandwich halfway through.

I didn’t extend my cold cap time beyond the standard protocol, even though I’d seen forums suggesting it. Just 30 minutes pre-infusion, then the chemo infusion, then 90 minutes post-infusion for the Red Devil and an hour for Paclitaxel. Once it was switched off, I’d wait about five minutes to defrost before taking it off.

Top tip: take a blanket, and instead of just laying it across yourself, loop it behind you and tuck yourself in from both sides. The tube at the back made me shudder every session before I figured this out - I wish I’d known this from the start.

The Daniel Field products

I credit so much to Daniel Field. Yes, hair loss happens at a cellular level and chemotherapy is pretty toxic, but we know topical products like Minoxidil can support hair - so why not give the scalp some help during chemo?

The Scalp Boosters contain ingredients designed to help cells survive stress. Whether they worked or I just got lucky, I’ll never know for certain, but I believe in them.

The recommended dose is one capful of Scalp Cooling Booster 1 and a squirt of Booster 2, mixed and rubbed into the scalp before cold capping, but I doubled it because of my thick hair. Then, over the following days at home, you do a rinse of Booster 1 diluted with water. I started doing this with a jug as per the instructions, but after the following sessions I felt it was more efficient to make a rinse in a spray bottle and spray directly to my scalp, focussing extra attention on the parting.

The products do make your hair unpleasantly crispy, so after the first few sessions I cut the rinse phase to a day or two rather than three. Then I’d wash and switch to the Hair Growth Active in the days leading up to the next session. Relentless, but this one leaves no residue, so it’s easier going. I had to buy extra products as I used so much, which was pricey, but cheaper than a wig!

The pillowcases

Silk pillowcases reduce friction and stop your hair pulling as you sleep. I’m a fidgety sleeper (my best friend describes it as “thrashing around”, which is as good a review of my bedroom behaviour as any), so I knew this mattered.

I tried practising with a satin bonnet the month before chemo started, but it fell off every single night. I experimented with pulling it tighter and tighter but all it did was cause discomfort and still not last the night. So I gave up.

Pillowcases are much easier. Carolina’s mum had some beautiful silk ones made for me in Brazil, which look stunning on the bed and are a dream to sleep on. I change my bedsheets fortnightly but swapped pillowcases weekly, since the Daniel Field products and some truly unpleasant sweaty hot flushes meant I needed the refresh. Some spare satin ones from TK Maxx kept me in clean rotation.

Honestly, this has converted me permanently. I’m not going back.

I also swapped my hairbands for satin scrunchies, which work much better now my hair is finer. My previous thickness would never have held with anything less than aggressively elasticated coarse bands, but now the smooth flimsy ones are actually better.

The shampoo

I’ve always struggled with product build-up, so generic gentle shampoos have never worked for me - just gunky dandruff and a scalp that never feels clean. Even anti-dandruff shampoos don’t cut it, so I’ve always relied on T/Gel.

There are a lot of active ingredients in it and I wasn’t sure how they’d interact with the Daniel Field products, but it seemed to work out fine. I also wash my hair just once a week, which probably helped.

The hairbrush

I’d been a Tangle Teezer convert for years, and the Detangler specifically made it much easier to brush gently. I’d hold the hair in my fist and work through the ends rather than dragging from the root - and the long Detangler handle meant I could be far more careful than with the Original.

The supplements

Even more disclaimer here: I am not remotely qualified to recommend anything. This is just what I took.

I’d been on Vitamin D for months before chemo and continued throughout, with my oncologist’s blessing. I’d also taken collagen capsules the previous year for hair, though I wasn’t sure I’d seen the benefit during my stress-shedding phase. Given the chemical menopause and the way chemo fatigue had aged my joints by a few decades, I wanted to revisit whether it could help.

The evidence is disputed, but it didn’t look likely to cause harm. Marine collagen is better for beauty benefits, but bovine is better for joints, so I went with bovine, with the hope that beautiful joints would lead to beautiful everything else, anyway. My oncologist approved it and reminded me I’d need Vitamin C for absorption.

So I chose Vital Proteins collagen peptides - a heaped tablespoon in my coffee every morning - plus Vitamin C and D, both as gummies, because I am a big child.

The scarves

I may never have needed a scarf to cover up as my parting held on fairly heroically, but I did wear them during the heavier shedding phases. Keeping my hair covered stopped me touching it, and a reasonably tight fit felt like it kept it from being caught by bag straps or fellow passengers on the tube. I picked up a couple of silk ones from Vestiaire, because if you’re going to have cancer, you may as well have a Pucci era.

The (lack of) styling

I’m a lazy girl with my hair. Always have been. It’s why I keep it long: long hair is the style, isn’t it? No hot brush required.

I’m glad I didn’t cut it before chemo. A specialist at Future Dreams advised against it, and my mum asked my oncologist, who told us it wasn’t necessary. Cutting it short won’t stop it falling out, so I didn’t.

I definitely appreciated having length to wrap into a bun or stroke over my shoulder, but it has also meant that I’m still happy not styling my hair. For five months, I didn’t touch a hot iron or any tight clip. Yes, I looked scruffy, but of course I bloody did. I’m a cancer patient!

Looking back at this video taken at a GHD event last year, I notice some volume loss, but I remember how scared I was and I wish I could show November 2025 Anna pictures of myself now!

Goodness, this got wordy. If you’ve skipped 2,000 words because you’ve just been diagnosed and are panic-Googling “cold cap success stories”, here’s the short version:

• Cancel the hair appointment

• Buy some satin pillowcases and a Tangle Teezer Detangler

• Book a consultation with Daniel Field

• Ask your oncologist for advice

• Don’t panic

• Good luck!

P.S. Don’t panic if you lose your hair by your ear where the cap doesn’t fit as well. I started chemo in January and finished in June. By the time I was halfway through Paclitaxel, I had grown a lot back, look!

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You cry when your hair starts to shed, not because you didn’t expect it, but because you did.

You cry when you see old photos from nine months ago, because you’re grieving the version of yourself who didn’t know what was coming.

You cry when a nurse remembers your name, because this isn’t a one-off appointment anymore, but a new plot in your life.

You cry when a friend tells you they’ll cut their hair to donate if you lose yours, because you’re not alone.

You cry when a guy asks for your number when walking back home from a blood test, because you can’t remember the last time you felt pretty.

You cry when you sit down in the chemotherapy chair, because it was the thing you were most scared of, and now it’s so very real.

You cry for no reason while making coffee because your body has suddenly had its oestrogen removed, sending every happy hormone into lockdown too.

You cry when you realise how fortunate you are to have the NHS taking care of you, because survival should never depend on geography.

You cry at 3am in a Google hole when your brain has convinced you the worst, because you’re scared you won’t see your nieces grow up.

You cry at the table for dinner with two old University friends just weeks after diagnosis because you’re happy to see them and had forgotten what that felt like.

You cry when someone says they booked a scan after seeing your news, because maybe something good came from all this after all.

You cry when you think about all those who faced the journey before you: before the cold cap, before portable fans, before excellent medication for the side effects. Because they had it harder.

You cry at normality when you realise the world kept moving, because yours completely stopped.

You cry when someone tells you they’re praying for you, thinking of you, rooting for you - because love is greater than fear.

You cry about literally everything but cancer, because devastation looks like everything except the thing you’re devastated about.

It’s important I keep them dormant though, so I’m putting together a helpful reference list to glance over, and if I feel nothing, the medication is clearly still working. Who needs scans and blood tests when you have my highly scientific and definitely peer-reviewed system? So here we go…

Starting off with Pep Guardiola as a little shock to everyone who expected Jack Grealish. Cheeky, but not stimulating the ovaries, sorry!

Ha, to everyone who thought Jack Grealish wouldn’t come up early. Now, I remember seeing this moment in a packed pub during the 2022 England v Japan game and let me tell you I FELT THOSE HORMONES via the women screaming around me. Not so much now.

Saint Levant is so good looking that two friends who do not share a ‘type’ created a Venn diagram of lust with me. I’ve seen him live, and he took his shirt off. Just realised I haven’t thought about that for a while, which is a good sign that Zoladex is doing its job.

This is getting a bit football heavy, but Jude Bellingham is a ten and that goal was a TEN. Couldn’t find the video but you know what I mean. Excites me for the World Cup, doesn’t excite my ovaries.

Going back to the OGs now: Mark Darcy. A human rights lawyer! In a silly jumper! The perfect amount of ‘practical whimsy’, as my good friend Bryony would say. I won’t be distracted by his handsome face so we can finally talk about human rights law! (crowd cheers) Unfortunately Zoladex also gives me brain fog, so I can no longer talk about human rights law. (crowd boos)

I didn’t fancy Jude Law when The Holiday first came out. But I definitely did last Christmas. Crucially, this was only a couple of weeks before my first Zoladex shot, making him perhaps the clearest before-and-after medical data point available to modern science.

OH COME ON, NOW. I don’t even know if I should continue here, the science is pretty conclusive.

Ooooh, I’m excited! But sadly Bad Bunny’s hip thrusts merely make me excited for my first club night post-chemo.

I think my work here is done. And before I hear you say, “but wait until you hear him speak - the accent!” I must sadly admit that Jamie Dornan’s Irish accent reminds me of my grandmother. So we can strike that from the dataset.

So there we go. It’s emotionally confusing to be grateful for a medication while also wanting to file a formal complaint against it.

In all seriousness though - and I mean this, because I’ve been whining about these side effects more than chemotherapy itself - it gets better. The first few weeks and months were hideous, but my brain is adapting remarkably well to all of the symptoms. This is just some silliness for the sake of silliness!

I used to get every single magazine, and I mean it. Sabrina’s Secrets converted me, and if you get the reference, book your next Botox appointment. I subscribed to Bliss, mum bought me Sugar every month (if I was good), and I picked up Cosmo Girl on shopping trips to Norwich. As I left adolescence behind, the subscriptions evolved: I signed up for ELLE and Glamour and picked up Vogue and Cosmopolitan each month wherever I was. More! magazine was my biweekly treat. At University, only one campus shop sold Tatler, which I would divert to on the way to the library.

The problem was: I grew up in a sleepy Suffolk village with zero publishing contacts and absolutely no idea how anyone actually got these jobs.

But a series of lucky steps brought me here, so here they are, if you're looking to get into the industry. (Do it for love, not money. Sorry.)

Things get interesting in 2014, so scroll ahead if you must.

2007: Sugar magazine competition winner

Nearly 20 bloody years ago. Oh my goodness. I entered a competition on a whim to describe my ideal birthday party and somehow won a grand to spend on my birthday bash in association with MTV’s My Super Sweet 16.

So unheard of in rural East Anglia, I ended up in our regional newspaper East Anglian Daily Times - a photographer even came to our house to take pictures. Cheesy, yes, but I used this as leverage on my teenage CV and UCAS statement, which probably helped a lot!

2012: East Anglian Daily Times and partners

It was my first summer at University, and without much to do in my local area (are you sensing a theme?), I sent an email out of the blue to Suffolk Magazine, offering my eager little fingers. They said yes, and for two months, I commuted into Ipswich every day writing stories on everything from care home finances to farmers’ markets for the local papers. One day, I had to interview a puppeteer who made performances entirely out of vegetables. Not exactly How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days, but I still thought it was the coolest job in the world.

I had a side hustle at University creating nerdy T-shirt designs (something I started on my gap year in Paris) which paid for my train tickets, and my mum prepared me a packed lunch every day. I am so grateful to my lovely supportive parents, and I don’t think I ever thanked my dad enough for taking me to Diss station every morning.

2014: a final year University project

I loved my degree. I even write about it on this page! We had the option of skipping a dissertation, so I threw my focus into a Language of Advertising project. I chose to compare linguistic features in jewellery adverts in Tatler and Glamour magazine, deep diving into the glossy reader and how marketers could best reach them.

I got a Starred first for the presentation and a First for the written assignment, and I was so proud. If you’re at university and trying to stand out, I genuinely recommend projects like this. They give you something distinctive to talk about even if you don’t yet have industry experience.

The link to the presentation still exists! Here: if you want to see it.

2014: a letter that changed it all

Graduation was looming, and I had friends with their teacher training placements or graduate schemes lined up for September. It’s a scary time, trying to get your 2.1 while also thinking ‘what the f*** is this all for?’ I half-heartedly applied for some marketing agencies, getting nowhere. My dad, who worked in HR all his life, gave me some old-fashioned pointers, which I hate to say worked.

One day, in his shed listening to Women’s Hour on Radio 4, he heard Suzy Menkes, International Vogue Editor, interviewed. ‘She sounds like a lovely lady,’ he said. ‘You should write to her’. And I did. With some thick paper from Paperchase and my best signature, it landed on the right desk, at the right time.

I joined as her Junior Fashion Assistant just a month later, ready to take on her diary during the SS15 shows. Not living in London was a nightmare, so I slept in a sleeping bag on a blow-up mattress on my brother’s living room floor. Exhausting. Life-changing!

2014-2015: more work experience

While working for Suzy, I had a Condé Nast pass, so marched over to Glamour magazine with my newly updated CV asking (read: begging) for work experience and the lovely editor’s PA got me a placement a few weeks later. I was on cloud bloody nine. I got work experience at Tatler the same way. I also joined the temporary pool to provide cover for PAs when they were on holiday. This was great as it was paid - peanuts, but enough to break even. I spent a few months working endless hours at the Four Horseshoes pub in Suffolk to pay for train tickets and lunches whenever I got a shift in London.

Magazine work experience sounds glamorous until you remember I basically lived in polyester because it folded into a backpack without creasing. I sofa-surfed across London between my brother, uncles, family friends, university friends, and my boyfriend at the time, learning increasingly ridiculous commuting routes across the city.

I’m knackered just remembering this!

2015: my first job

PA roles are a great entry level position in big publishing companies. The first one that came up offered me an interview, which was…interesting. The second one that came up was for the Finance team, where I met my first boss, who still is one of the most remarkable women I’ve ever encountered in my life. Perhaps some people find it a confusing first step, but back then I actually wanted to move into strategy and management roles - in fact, my dream job was to be a Managing Editor. Also - and I say this with full sincerity - I really love accountants.

I made the permanent move to London, finding a house share in Shepherd’s Bush.

I adored that job. My team was lovely, the work was varied, and I loved compiling monthly reports for senior leadership, seeing the operating costs behind things like GQ’s Men of the Year issue or Vogue pop-up shops.

2017: my second job

After two years in Finance, my ridiculously supportive boss started to help me move on. The PA to the Editor role at Glamour came up, and I interviewed with the managing editor. Wow, the job a million girls would kill for, eh? I still felt like it couldn’t quite be my life, from my tiny Suffolk village. I admired my new boss just as much - she was very cool, very funny, and a bloody amazing editor.

Sadly, the state of publishing started to crumble, and we were on the front line. A huge restructure wiped out most of the team - a rite of passage in this industry, I’ve since learned, though that doesn’t make it any less gutting.

Luckily, I had written an article for the site and the online editor, lovely Leanne Bayley, fought my case to stay on as a writer during the transitional period. That genuinely saved me - I was already struggling to pay rent and had suddenly started panic-applying for everything: retail jobs, marketing assistant roles, anything remotely stable. At the same time, my boss was helping connect me with other PA opportunities. Everyone was trying to help everyone else survive.

That’s when Leanne scored a job at Fabulous magazine at the Sun. I joined her as Features Writer, and we started at the newspaper in early 2018.

2018: the end (or maybe the beginning!)

Newspapers are different. Far more men in suits, far fewer air kisses. It was intense. My first shift was a Friday and I was asked to do the Saturday night cover the following day, responsible for the whole magazine’s output. The headlines were tough and the deadlines were tougher.

I learnt a huge amount very quickly and I’ll always be grateful for that experience. But deep down, Leanne and I both missed glossy magazines. So, we went back! And that’s where my work experience ended and I’d carved out my little place in this chaotic industry.

I’ve met some of the best people in the world through publishing - former PAs, fellow journalists, fabulous PRs - and even though the industry isn’t quite as lucrative or glamorous as its golden era, it’s still endlessly exciting to me.

We’re standing on the edge of another huge shift now: a more digital, faster-moving world, with AI becoming part of the process whether we like it or not. And I still want to be part of what comes next, because somewhere inside me is a teenage girl buying magazines in rural Suffolk who never imagined this could become her life.

Because 'How are you?' presents a genuine dilemma for those who are suffering - it makes it almost inevitable that they'll flout the maxim of quantity, quality, or manner.

Let me break this down.

In conversation, we adhere to certain rules. Ask someone what they had for supper and ‘spaghetti bolognese’ is a reasonable answer. ‘Food’ is too vague; the full list of ingredients is, obviously, absurd. Both violate the maxim of quantity (giving as much information as reasonably required) and such violations are usually deliberate - for sarcasm, irony or plain rudeness.

In ordinary British life, ‘how are you?’ works perfectly. Bump into someone in the supermarket and they can respond with ‘fine, you?’, or optionally adding extra context: ‘kitchen renovations are a nightmare, but all good!’ Pass someone in the work kitchen and ‘busy’, ‘tired’, ‘stressed’ or ‘hungover’ (hey, I work in media) all function as proportionate answers. You probably saw them in a meeting that morning and have already gauged their emotional terrain.

Ask someone going through trauma ‘how are you?’ and it creates a quandary. ‘Fine’ is a lie, flouting the maxim of quality. ‘Not fine’ is truthful, but sounds deliberately blunt, and violates the maxim of quantity. And the real answer - ‘I got into a Google hole last night, spiralled, wrote a draft speech for my funeral, but then this morning I got out into the sunshine and feel better. Scheduled to cry again just before lunch if all goes to plan’ - is, socially speaking, deranged. We no longer know how much information constitutes a normal answer. And the pressure of twisting our suffering into something socially manageable becomes exhausting in itself.

Questions with a narrower scope often work better than existentially open-ended ones. How was chemo - what number are you on now? Any plans for the sunny weekend? How have your appointments gone this week? These give the sufferer (I hate to use that word, but you know what I mean) something concrete and answerable, rather than demanding a sweeping summary of their entire emotional condition. We can respond truthfully, while still choosing whether to open the door to heavier conversation. None of Grice’s Maxims are violated this way.

I know, you’re probably thinking: ‘Be honest! I’m messaging because I want to hear! I care!’ Because these were my exact thoughts when I used to check in on friends after a break-up or bereavement. But I hadn’t considered to what extent the sufferer might not know how to answer. Or how exhausting it is to calibrate your honesty for the comfort of others. And what will they do with it if the answer is honest, yet chilling? It feels too heavy to hand to another person, especially when there is nothing they can realistically do except feel sad alongside you.

Because trauma breaks everything, and that includes conversation. The asker knows the truthful answer may be too enormous; the sufferer knows the socially acceptable answer is false. Of course, the right question would be something like: Given that everything is objectively quite awful, and that you are almost certainly not okay, where exactly on that spectrum are you today?

But as humans, we try our best to be efficient communicators. In Phonetics and Phonology, we learn that when a language lacks a particular sound in its phonetic inventory, speakers map it onto the closest available one. It’s why native French speakers often swap the English ‘th’ for a ‘z’ or ‘s’ - the mouth is looking for the nearest approximation.

And I know that this three-word question actually means: I know something awful is happening to you and I’m not entirely sure what to say, but I’m trying to reach out anyway - it’s just ‘how are you?’ is the closest approximation available, which is incredibly touching. ‘How are you’ may be linguistically imperfect, but perhaps it is perfect in its approximation.

It is a problem with language, not with people.

The book proves that very often, outcomes are shaped not merely by effort, but by circumstance – and ultimately by factors that manifest themselves long before ‘hard work’ even becomes an option. It is one of the reasons I consider myself left-wing: if this is true, then a fair society must mitigate inequality through public investment and, where that falls short, empathy.

The friend I was discussing it with recently was rolling his eyes a little, as most people do when I talk about social issues (ha!), but more because the point I was making was obvious, not controversial. But he also added something I hadn’t considered.

“Meritocracy,” he said, “will never truly be possible for as long as sickness and disability exist. Even if you fix societal inequality, illness will always set people back.”

I thought of that conversation recently. As well as how it impacts success through career pauses and brain fog, fatigue, and anxiety, cancer is an example of where meritocracy fails. Health is the hard-work part, and in many cases it can substantially help you avoid illness and improve life expectancy - but it can never eliminate that risk entirely. Health is a balanced diet, regular exercise, adequate sleep and avoiding dangerous substances. It is grounded in science and we would all benefit from doing our best to adhere to it.

Health is a biological state, and wellness is an industry worth billions that capitalises on it. Wellness is now pastel adverts for pastel leggings that make your bum look great; health is the hospital gown that opens at the back, exposing that bum.

A great deal of the made-for-social-media wellness industry rests on the neat belief that overpriced glass-bottled products, ‘mindset’ and discipline hold more weight than luck and modern medicine. But just as success is not purely the reward of hard work and poverty is not a moral failure, not getting cancer is not simply a reward for good behaviour, and chemotherapy is not a punishment for bad habits. Virtue may influence the odds, but it does not determine the outcome.

You can do everything right and still get a life-changing illness. Or die young. There is nothing I scroll past faster than someone telling me journalling and herbs can cure my cancer. Because anything other than luck and modern medicine is essentially telling me that I caused it myself in the first place by not subscribing to each and every wellness regime. To me, it comes from the same place that tells people they can pull themselves up by the bootstraps while they miss out on a job to the CFO’s son.

This is evidenced in the young cancer patients I am lucky to chat to every day: the girl who runs marathons, the teetotal yoga instructor, the reformer Pilates-and-matcha devotee, and the HYROX competitor who continues to train even during chemotherapy. If health were a moral achievement, they all would have been spared.

My cancer was ‘cured’ by my extraordinary breast and plastic surgeons, and my ‘wellness’ now is due to monumental medical breakthroughs from researchers, filtered down to my oncologist Queen Victoria’s prescriptions (if you’ve read this, you’ll understand). Wellness may be aspirational, but medicine is accountable.

None of this makes me anti-wellness – genuinely. Done right, it’s total self-care, and I love it all. I drink collagen, take vitamin supplements, blend smoothies, walk in nature, and practise acupuncture, reflexology, and meditation. It’s comforting and enjoyable, and I’m likely to do even more for the rest of my life. But I will still be asking my oncologist first. These days, I am firmly in my era of listening to doctors over influencers and putting my trust in those wearing scrubs, not Lululemon.

We all know someone who smokes a pipe into their eighties or drinks gin into their nineties, cheerfully defying every rule in the wellness handbook – for me, that was my grandparents – and yet hospitals still have entire wards dedicated to children. Longevity has never been distributed according to virtue. Biology is not a meritocracy. As the marriage vow reminds us, “in sickness and in health, for richer, for poorer.” The vow understood long before economists and influencers that wealth and wellness are often simply circumstances, and should never impact our care for one another.

But then, in the final chapter, Bloodworth warns of the consequences of believing too strongly in meritocracy:

“The more meritocratic Britain becomes (or, to be more precise, the more Britain believes it is a meritocracy), the less sympathy there will likely be for those who find themselves at the bottom. If you believe that poverty is mainly caused by personal imprudence, you are less likely to want to see the government spend money trying to alleviate it.”

The same logic applies to illness. If we start to believe health is simply the reward for virtue, we risk withholding compassion from those who fall sick. Recognising that both affluence and illness are often shaped by forces beyond individual control should make us kinder, not harsher.

With this in mind, we should find even more compassion – for the sick as much as the struggling – and even more praise and funding for the NHS. Because cancer is not a moral failing; it is a matter of biology, chance and circumstance.

Milton seemed slightly unsure of the silver himself, which makes the whole phrase feel less like a promise and more like a cautious suggestion. Still, maybe it helps to look. So here we go…

No leg hair

It’s happened! I haven’t picked up a razor in weeks. My eyebrows are thinning and the less said about my eyelashes the better, but the backs of my thighs have never felt so good. Just in time for spring. You will not see me out of mini skirts until it returns.

Zero heating bills

Ok fine, I’ve had to spend money on fans instead. But my menopausal self hasn’t touched the thermostat since my second Zoladex shot. Taking the win!

Lime and soda

London needs to have a word with itself about mocktails. If a negroni is £14, a no-groni shouldn’t be £12. Can someone please send this Substack to Sadiq Khan, thanks. Anyway, most pubs don’t serve the best non-alcoholic beer (Adnams Ghost Ship), so I’m guzzling 80p lime and soda, which is banging for the wallet - AND I wake up with super hydrated skin.

Meeting cancer baddies

Last time, I mentioned learning more about doctors and nurses. They’re my heroes, but I also have other heroes - the girls I’ve met through this entire journey. From the very moment I found out, I was put in touch with a younger PR who was nearly finishing chemo, who threw me perspective and advice. I’ll never forget it. Since then, I’ve chatted to heaps of wonderful women - met through Instagram, friends of friends, or hospital waiting rooms. I’m in awe of them. I couldn’t have done this without them.

Becoming a medical ‘expert’

This is absolutely not putting me anywhere near the same league - or even the same universe - as the surgeons, doctors and nurses who have treated me. But it has been satisfying learning about drugs and disease, I must say. I even scribbled down the new words I’ve learnt here.

The tummy tuck

I’ve never had a flat stomach in my life, but my DIEP flap donor site is looking pretty bloody great. Even with the amount of snacking, thanks to the steroid appetite. I’m genuinely thrilled!

NHS sandwiches

The ones my hospital serves are banging. Egg mayo on white bread, please.

Reframing a ‘good day’

A good day used to be productive and social. Gym in the morning, out for brunch, completing an errand, dressing up for dinner, being the last one at the bar, not demolishing my Uber rating. Now it’s smiling, not crying, in the mirror, to my friends, at my oncologist appointment. The bar is on the floor, and yet, the quality is somehow higher.

Speaking of… permission to be boring

There is a very specific freedom in no longer needing to be “fun.” If I want to go home at 9pm, I go home. I’m exhausted and my social battery isn’t where it used to be, but I no longer think that anyone minds. And I’ve realised they never did.

Finally having a skincare regime

That I actually stick to. I’ve had to swap out a few active ingredients, so I’ve streamlined everything to work with chemo skin. Ectoin and niacinamide are my BFFs right now, but post-treatment I’m going to keep the habits - just with skin that isn’t being injected with poison every week.

Perspective

Things that used to ruin my day now barely make the shortlist.

This was written hurriedly to reframe my mind before heading out for a walk with a fellow cancer warrior. None of this redeems it. It doesn’t suddenly become worth it because I’ve discovered egg mayo sandwiches or a decent skincare routine. But like Milton, I’m willing to believe the silver might be there.

While most people are on the steady trajectory of time sending them closer to death, my chemotherapy infusions are doing the opposite: improving my life expectancy, one dose at a time. It’s a strange place to be - waking up statistically further from the fate my body tried to give me. Carlo Rovelli explains in The Order of Time that time is not a neat, linear line, but instead one that bends and stretches. Right now, I’m hovering in the middle: while treatment has catapulted my body into a much older version of itself, it’s also handing me back more of my future.

It’s not quite the anti-ageing routine I would have preferred to be on, but honestly, after starting collagen peptides (with permission from my oncologist!) and discovering how revolting they taste, chemotherapy suddenly doesn’t feel so bad.

And it’s not just the fact that this is a rare period in my life where my life expectancy is inching upwards. I also have a strange kind of biological reversal to look forward to. Right now, drugs called Zoladex have dunked me abruptly into menopause to protect my ovaries during chemotherapy and preserve my fertility. The result is that, at 33, I currently have many of the side effects of a woman decades older than me: hot flushes, night sweats, brain fog, and a lower libido. At the moment I can look at Pep Guardiola and be more interested in what he’s saying than how he looks in a turtleneck, which feels medically concerning.

But while women go through puberty, fertility, then menopause and never leave, I’ll get to cancel my menopausal trial period (one star, would not recommend) and come out the other side. My friends will face their ovaries shutting down at some point in their lives, yet I have a period of them waking up again to experience - quite literally turning back that biological clock. It’s not quite there yet. But eventually, when the injections stop, my hormonal self will effectively de-age thirty years. How thrilling.

And then there’s the more visible ageing reversal. In the throes of chemotherapy, while I have been reasonably lucky with the side effects, I’m struggling with zapped energy levels and thinning hair. To say it’s unpleasant to be experiencing this as a 33-year-old is an understatement, but it is not permanent.

After my final dose, I know what to expect: my hair will immediately start to thicken, and I’ll look in the mirror and hopefully feel that little bit younger. And there will be a time in the not too distant future when I won’t get out of breath walking up a flight of stairs. One social occasion won’t drain my battery for days. Strength and stamina are usually things that decline with age, but I’m getting the opposite. I’ll be the Benjamin Button of breast cancer.

While Silicon Valley billionaires are spending millions trying to reverse ageing, for a surreal period of my life, I get to be doing it for free.

They say youth is wasted on the young, but now it’s something I get to look forward to. I won’t be stuck in the body of my exhausted, post-menopausal self, facing death at arm’s length. In the coming days, weeks, and months, I’m rolling back that clock. Rovelli is right: time isn’t a straight line after all.

To see old age is a privilege. I’ve just already had the preview.

Because cancer was something that happened to other people. Until it happens to you - or someone you love - and then suddenly you’re fluent in a language you never asked to learn.

Words that meant absolutely nothing to me a few months ago are now part of my daily vocabulary. I drop them casually into conversation, met with blank faces, and then have to explain myself - which is fair enough, because I didn’t know any of these words before September 2025 either.

So. You probably know mastectomy and you’ve heard of chemotherapy.

But would you know these without Googling them?

Go on - let’s do a test…

DIEP flap procedure

Breast surgery and reconstruction is highly personal, so it’s no wonder you might not know this one. Good thing your oversharing bestie (that’s me, hi!) spoke non-stop about her boobs before her diagnosis, and that hasn’t changed now.

While some people choose a lumpectomy (removing just the tumour), a double mastectomy to go flat (seriously chic), or implants (hey, free boob job), I went for a DIEP flap reconstruction.

A chunk of my stomach was cut out - skin, nerves and fat - and moulded into the shape of my left breast to match the other one. It’s my own living tissue, which means it can withstand radiotherapy and should last for years. There’s also a bonus tummy tuck! Although let me tell you: the recovery for that is rough. However, four months post-procedure I’ve got about 70% sensation back, which I’m thrilled about.

The final result itself was incredible too (thank you, plastic surgeons) but unfortunately my body threw a small tantrum afterwards and developed an infection, so the original reconstruction didn’t fully survive. In a few months I’ll have another operation to perfect it again. I’m so excited!

Margins

The border of healthy tissue surgeons remove around a tumour. “Clear margins” are the two words you want to hear.

Cannula

A sort of makeshift USB port for your body, used in hospitals to administer fluids or medication.

Lymph nodes

Lymph was my go-to Wordle guess if I already had the vowels (genius, right? You can have it too, if you like). Now I know lymph nodes are filters for viruses and bacteria throughout your body. And if cancer spreads there, there’s a chance it could travel further. Hence the need for aggressive treatment, like chemotherapy.

Axilla

This is actually such a pretty girl’s name, don’t you think? If it didn’t mean armpit. I had my axillary lymph nodes removed because they’re the first place cancer from the boob can spread. Which is exactly what mine did.

Seroma

A pocket of fluid that can form after surgery, like a tiny, unwanted Capri-Sun.

ER/PR & HER2

Breast cancer can be fuelled by hormones (like mine) or HER2 (a protein promoting fast cell regrowth). Or both. Or neither. ER/PR+ is a bit easier to treat as you can switch off hormones to starve growth, but there are brilliant new immunotherapies to treat HER2+ cancers.

C-Reactive Protein

This one is actually fascinating! CRP is a protein produced by the liver, and when blood tests show elevated levels, it’s a marker of inflammation or infection.

While I was stuck in hospital with an infection and very little to do, I started Googling my blood test results to see what was up. Spoiler: it was my CRP.

I’ve now had countless blood tests filled with markers I still don’t fully understand. But I love how simple this one is: doctors can immediately tell if you have an infection and how severe it might be.

Oncologist

For the past few weeks I’ve seen my oncologist, Victoria, more often than I’ve seen my closest friends and even my parents. Dubbed Queen Victoria by me and another young cancer patient I know, and spoken highly of by all of her patients on the ward, she is guiding me (and us all!) through chemotherapy and further treatment.

Oncologists are doctors specialising in cancer treatment, but I didn’t meet her until after my diagnosis and surgery. My breast surgeon, Meera, removed the cancer, then my plastic surgeon, Georgina, did my reconstruction, and Victoria stepped in once I’d recovered enough to begin chemotherapy.

They speak regularly in MDT meetings (multidisciplinary team discussions where surgeons, oncologists and other specialists review results and decide on the best treatment plan), and I often wonder what those meetings look like, and how different they are from my editorial meetings at a celebrity news magazine. I hope there are biscuits.

Since starting chemo, Victoria checks in with me before every session. She doesn’t let you suffer. She asks about side effects and prescribes medication or advice for each one. She now knows intimate details about my bowel habits and my sex life, which is probably a reason I like her so much - she knows as much as my best friends do about me.

For many patients, oncologists are the backbone of the whole experience.

Zoladex

I’ll write a full post about the hideousness that is Zoladex another time. But quickly for now: it’s an injection that temporarily switches off my ovaries. Turns out 33-year-old Anna really liked her hormones. Not sure everyone else did.

Cold cap

I feel slightly ridiculous for not knowing about this earlier. It was actually my brilliant boss Sophie who mentioned it when I was messaging her in a mild panic about losing my hair.

The idea is simple: your scalp is frozen during chemotherapy, reducing how much of the drug reaches your hair follicles. It doesn’t work for everyone, especially with aggressive chemo regimes like mine, but it has been revolutionary for many patients.

Everyone always ask how it feels, and my answer, without meaning to sound patronising, is usually: how do you think it feels? Freezing! Awful!

I’ve lost around 40–50% of my hair, but I still have a decent amount left, and I’m incredibly grateful for it.

The Red Devil

Drugs.com explains:

“Doxorubicin is considered one of the strongest chemotherapy drugs ever developed for breast cancer. It can kill cancer cells at every stage of their life cycle. It’s also known as ‘The Red Devil’ because it’s a bright red colour.”

Side effects commonly include total hair loss, nausea, anaemia, fatigue and mouth sores. Oh, and your pee turns red.

I was lucky with mine. I had minimal nausea, some fatigue, and a weird fuzzy mouth feeling - a bit like after eating a huge bag of heavily flavoured salt-and-vinegar crisps.

Although honestly, if we’re naming drugs after their colour, I think it should be called Strawberry Lace chemo. Much friendlier.

Tumour grade

Not to be mistaken for stage. Grade is how aggressive the cells look under the microscope. Mine were pretty enthusiastic, AKA grade 3.

Neutropenia

This is when your white blood cell count drops dangerously low after chemotherapy, so even minor fever can become an emergency, as your body can’t fight it off. You’ll be told to go straight to A&E if your temperature hits 38°C, and I even have a little card with a special number to ring (no, you can’t have it) because it can be life-threatening.

Scanxiety

Not entirely a medical word, but every Reddit forum mentions it. It’s exactly as it sounds: the unease your body can’t shake off while you’re waiting for results and appointments.

So there you have it. I tried for years to learn French, and even moved to Paris to immerse myself in it. I was crap. But since being thrown into pretty hefty treatment, I’ve picked up cancer-cabulary much easier.

But this isn’t a post to dwell on the awful moments, so I’m going to get right into it: I’ve been thankful for some parts of this cancer rollercoaster. Because while I am giving cancer my absolute everything right now, it’s also giving me a fair bit back. “Ask not what you can do for cancer, but what cancer can do for you,” quipped an old primary school/drama school friend (hi and thank you, Anita), after I said I was grateful to take a step back on life for a bit.

So, in no particular order…

Being able to wear pink - or even better, pink bows - unironically

It’s been my favourite colour for all of my 33 years on this planet. And now I get to make it my personality! Breast cancer swag is the prettiest. Because boobs are the prettiest and they deserve it, even if they’re a bit malignant at times.

Silk pillowcases

I swapped to protect my hair as much as I can and WHAT is this luxurious sorcery?! Everything I needed to feel like a princess was a tenner from TK Maxx?

Receiving flowers

My flat looks beautiful. I feel so loved.

Buying yourself flowers

My £2.59 weekly pink tulips from my local supermarket are my little treat (to stop me from spending money on other, bigger treats, which I cannot afford).

Becoming hyper aware of your body

You probably don’t remember the first time you sat up unaided or became conscious of your own body. Because you were a tiny little infant. Well, I may be crying as much as a toddler sometimes, but I’ve also experienced these very moments with cognitive appreciation. The days after surgery where each morning became easier to get out of bed, or noticing the sensation return in the new breast has made me feel so present in my own body. It’s an intimacy with yourself that not many people get to experience in adulthood - aren’t I lucky?

Not using headphones and actually having to read books in waiting rooms

You can’t be plugged in if your name is called, so carrying a book in a tote bag everywhere is making me feel like a student again. Without the hangover.

The steroid appetite

I am snacking and I cannot be stopped. A massive plate of crackers, cheese, and berries hates to see me coming.

The edgy wardrobe side-effect

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that I’m the least cool person in the world. That was, until I’m forced into headscarves (the Italian grandma trend is still strong this year, I’m sure of it) and/or Teen Vogue’s haircut of 2026: the Bixie. Doctor-prescribed drip. (I made it uncool again, hehe).

Learning more about the people that are saving you

In a previous post, I’ve spoken about the brilliance of surgeons. But the friendly faces on reception, the nurses who change your dressings, and the oncologist who is with you through every step become your heroes too. They dedicate their working lives to helping others, and you find yourself caring as much for them as you do your friends. More people to love, more love to give, more love in yourself.

Maggie’s Centre

Your hospital should have one. It’s a quiet spot for anyone going through cancer, offering emotional and practical support - or just a tea and some biscuits while you wait for appointments. Queen cancer warrior Emma Davidson called it ‘the Soho House of Cancer’.

No periods

My ovaries have been put to sleep so I’m gonna use the money saved on tampons to buy new underwear. Cos I no longer need time of the month underwear.

Crying

AKA the most cleansing, cathartic feeling in the world. And I no longer need to sit through Kate and Leo for three hours to have a good sob, I just need to shake my hair so that it gently grazes my lower back. Or open messages from my loved ones who have just been so bloody amazing to me. And that post-cry glow is sublime.

The lack of guilt

The number one priority in my life right now is getting through treatment. As someone who overthought every text she sent, every meal she indulged, every ‘wasted’ moment she should be socialising, switching off all those thoughts for the first time in my life has been utterly refreshing.

Turning it into an occasion

I’ve bought lots of new film for my Instax camera and a bright pink photo album to fill with snaps from my chemo journey, starting with the day before my first session when my two best friends, Grace and Carolina, came over to pack my bag with me. It’s like wedding planning but without the expensive hairdresser - quite the opposite, in fact. It’s a life occasion that deserves chronicling and it may as well be aesthetic.

These won’t apply to everyone, which is exactly the point. Cancer is personal. I’m sure there are things that apply to others and not to me, too. Wherever you are on your cancer ride - or if you’re watching from afar - remember that even in grief and sadness, there are always moments of joy. Even tiny ones. Especially tiny ones.

Wikipedia defines a superhero as follows:

“A superhero or superheroine, is a character who typically possesses superpowers or abilities beyond those of ordinary people; is frequently costumed, concealing their identity; and fits the role of the hero, typically using their powers to help the world become a better place.”

Perhaps I won’t be quite as in trouble with my supervisor if I apply a tiny bit of my degree to the point I’m making here. Set theory is usually a mathematical subject, but when applied to linguistics (in the second year module I scraped by), it, amongst other things, uses logic to expose ambiguity in category definitions. In Wikipedia’s definition, because there is no constraint listing superheroes as fictional, surgeons meet all the necessary criteria: abilities beyond those of ordinary people, costumed, fits the role of the hero, typically using their powers to help the world. By the logic of the definition, surgeons are therefore superheroes in the literal set-theoretic sense. I’m allowing creative licence to interpret ‘concealing identity’ as wearing a mask, because I’m allowed to, because this is my Substack.

Sadly, I cannot remember how to break down the formula to prove this. So I’m going to ask AI to help and paste it at the bottom of this page - not just as a favour to you, dear reader, but because I am nostalgically curious myself after making this long-winded, pretentious, and frankly fruitless point. Because I’m here to talk about superhero surgeons in the real world, not the logical one.

I am in awe of the brains of surgeons. When you think about cutting open a human body, can you really do it - pick up a scalpel and push the blade through flesh, fat, nerves, and muscle? Typing that alone gave me goosebumps, so I can imagine the answer is ‘no’ for most people, probably all citing empathy or disgust. Surgeons, however, have something extraordinary inside them: they can mentally convert a human body into an engineering problem without emotionally converting the person into an object, and they do so with immense kindness and compassion.

I’ve read a handful of books written by doctors or human body specialists because of how much I respect their field, and how little I really understand: Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole, Being Mortal, Do No Harm, Unnatural Causes and This is Going to Hurt. Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole specifically analyses the brain and the two definitions of it I simply cannot fuse together: the brain is flesh and ‘grey matter’ when opened up, yet equally, it is home to memories, personality, and consciousness. Surgeons live inside this paradox. In theatre, they know exactly what to do when a patient is cut open, reducing the body to a system that needs rewiring; in clinic, they can kindly explain what it will entail and/or what happened during the procedure without frightening or dehumanising them.

I’ve met lots of surgeons recently. Nearly five weeks ago, I had my mastectomy, DIEP flap procedure, and lymph node clearance. I then developed an infection - genuinely rare, just bad bloody luck, so please don’t panic if you’re awaiting breast cancer surgery - which meant a couple more procedures to clean things out. I am now sadly facing another operation next week because a tiny amount of pre-cancerous cells were found just outside the margins that were removed, so they’re being taken out. I feel like I should Google a better way of saying ‘I’m beyond grateful’ because that just doesn’t seem strong enough, but anything more polished wouldn’t come from the heart. And isn’t that the whole point of this waffly essay - contrasting the literal body with the meaning we attach to it?

I mean it regarding my gratitude: the breast surgery team saved my life by removing the cancer and the plastic surgery team carefully crafted a happy, confident new life using my own tissue. How can I ever idolise a celebrity again, when these superheroes walk among us?

Because it’s not just the moments before and after theatre, when I see them in scrubs and masks, talking jargon I don’t understand and using marker pens to turn my torso into a page of origami instructions. The first time I met my lead plastic surgeon, Dr Georgina Williams, I could tell that she was one of the most remarkable women I will ever encounter as she measured me and asked questions - her surgical brain focussed on my body while her human brain took in details about the person inside it.

At the end of that appointment, she warmly asked my mum if she had heterochromia (a condition where your eyes are different colours), adding sincerely that they looked beautiful. My mum is blind in one eye and wears a coloured contact with only a subtle difference to her working eye. In 68 years, nobody had either noticed or asked about it. See what I mean? Plastic surgery isn’t about slipping an implant in here and there, it’s about extraordinary attention to detail to the human anatomy. I witnessed that not just on the operating table after my ten-hour procedure, looking down at my incredible (if I’m allowed to say that) reconstruction, but as an offhand compliment to someone I love. My lead breast surgeon, Dr Meera Joshi, spends half her working days carefully slicing chests open and performing operations I will never even begin to understand, yet when she is in the clinic breaking down results to patients, she can explain bad news gently and reassuringly - although I wish I hadn’t had the experience to confirm that.

This is what I mean. These superheroes cut me open, removed my cancer, and sewed me up so beautifully that my friends have referred to them as literal magicians. They never treated me like faulty equipment in need of repair*, but as a whole person whose life mattered. “Thank you” will never be enough.

*I should add that perhaps they did, but it was when I was carefully asleep thanks to my brilliant anaesthetist, who deserves a much more considered essay about consciousness and the fragile bridge she navigates carrying an asleep and alive patient over the terrifying opposites of just that. It’s spellbinding when you really think about it, isn’t it?

The part where I outsource my degree to Wikipedia and AI to make a point and officially insult the whole of academia, sorry:

There are things that you’re meant to do: pack your hospital bag, remove your nail polish, have a good clean. But beyond that, it’s all down to personal preference - which is where I wish tradition would give me a helping hand.

Let me put it into context.

On Christmas Eve in the Johnstone household, we have macaroni cheese for supper. My mum makes it once a year, because by Christmas Day she’s too busy fretting over parsnips and stuffing to attempt anything more complicated. It’s a tradition born from chaotic years past, and it’s become something comforting, something officially festive to us.

We also stay up for midnight mass, getting home around 1am to the sight of Father Christmas’ visit - though that stopped when I turned 30 (which was almost as upsetting as losing the 26–30 railcard). The tradition began after an overexcited seven-year-old Anna woke up at 4am one Christmas, dragging her older brother into laps of the creaky Old Rectory corridor, excitably sharing gifts.

The idea was that midnight mass would tire us out and curb the excitement so our parents could sleep until we pounced on their bed, demanding “under-tree” presents. See? It makes sense. Both traditions existed to keep Mum from collapsing.

Now, speaking of exhausting Mum: my cancer.

My big surgery (mastectomy, DIEP flap reconstruction, and lymph node clearance) is tomorrow - in less than 12 hours. There are no previous years to draw from, no precedent for what’s appropriate on the eve of such a thing. So I’ve been winging it.

When I last had dinner at my best friend Grace’s flat, it was a bad day. Something I feel incredibly guilty about lately is how every conversation with friends seems to circle back to my cancer. I wonder how they put up with me, honestly. Any chat about work, clothes, boys, beauty, or life always loops back to appointments and how I’m feeling. That’s what cancer does - it invades all the good in you, literally and figuratively, until it’s stopped.

That night, I stayed until 3 a.m., drenching tissue after tissue with the tears I was trying so hard to explain: I’m fighting this hideous thing, but what if it just kills me?

Everyone praises my positivity, but I’m not immune to the darkest thoughts, and last week, they spread as rapidly as a grade 3 tumour. As I left in a taxi, Grace promised to spend the night before my surgery with me, not wanting me to be alone in that state. Carolina jumped at the chance too, so the plan was set: a girly night in, with tissues and pep talks on standby.

That was how I’d planned to end my weekend countdown. But what about the rest?

Well, a farewell was needed, so I gathered my nearest and dearest for The Funeral of Anna’s Left Boob: a pub session to say goodbye and catch up in case recovery kept me out of sight for a while. I was spoiled rotten with gifts, hugs, and love. Thanks for the mammories, guys.

We need more noise for Sudan, by the way!

Saturday was left vague. I ran final errands to prep the flat for my parents’ stay while I’m in hospital. I joined the Sudan march for as long as I could, saw a friend who missed the FUNeral, and grabbed some paint before the shops closed. I’d painted my living room already and couldn’t wait to finish the archway into the kitchen, making my home as pretty as possible for recovery. (Also: can we talk about how good it looks?!)

This morning, I met a close friend for a roast, half-expecting to dissolve into tears - but wait for it… the hysteria never came. I just spoke about how excited I am to have the tumour gone, and to get my “bonus tummy tuck.”

Grace woke up with a cold, which we’d usually ignore, but I can’t take any risks, so it was just Carolina who came over. She arrived armed with gorgeous gifts and an even more gorgeous soul. When she hugged me goodbye, I made myself a peppermint and liquorice tea and started writing this - smiling.

The point is, my planning was based entirely on what I knew before: that I’d be miserable and shit scared. But instead, tonight I feel something else: calm, even happy.

I’m not waiting for a man in a red hat to bring make-believe magic to my day, I’m waiting for a woman in scrubs to bring real-life magic to my life. And in that way, Surgery Eve is actually better than Christmas Eve.

Before I go on, I should acknowledge that I’m fortunate to have lived in a body that fits easily into what society calls ‘standard’ - non-disabled, within average sizes - with all the privilege that comes with my background and the colour of my skin and hair. It’s something I don’t take lightly.

Little fact - I was wearing this pink T-shirt the day I found out I had cancer!

Does any other millennial remember when they first got on the scales? I remember weighing myself daily by the end of primary school. I think my grandma’s offhand “fat” comments were the catalyst, which is why I now avoid any weight-related language around children. By Year 7, I knew what a calorie was and that it was supposed to be bad. Despite having a wonderful diet of home-cooked meals every night and a healthy packed lunch at school, I impossibly compared myself to Paris Hilton and Kate Moss (and I remember my horrified reaction to that Jessica Simpson photo. WTAF?!) and truly wondered if nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.

I did swimming lessons and trampolining classes, and I was never bad at fitness-based PE lessons (chuck me a ball and it’s a different story). But it wasn’t enough. For my 14th or 15th birthday, I asked for an exercise bike to keep in my bedroom to use before and after school. When I was 16, I tried the Special K diet. For the blissfully uninitiated, it involved two bowls of cereal a day and one other “healthy” meal (which I often tried to skip). The promise was to lose a dress size, because in 2008, being a size 10 felt unthinkable.

At university, I joined the gym and went so often it balanced out the chicken burgers and pints. For a while, things were good. But in my final year, after gaining a little “relationship weight,” I slashed my calories to almost nothing. I can’t even remember what I said when people asked for my “secret”. It’s hard to explain to anyone who didn’t grow up then how warped it all was - being ‘thin’ wasn’t just aspirational, it was a moral achievement.

Anyway, at the ripe old age of 33 - and for the record, one unexpected thing about getting cancer is how young it makes you feel. I’m the youngest in every waiting room! People pity me for my youth! - I’ve finally, somehow, made peace with my body.

It’s got a killer immune system (cancer notwithstanding), it gets me laid often enough, and it can take on whatever challenge I throw at it: a mountain hike, a night on the dance floor, a long day in the sun. My hair is finally the length I like, my boobs fill a bra size I’m happy with, I’ve grown into my two front teeth, and knee-high boots - back in fashion - have never been kinder to my thighs. I’ve stopped caring that my stomach will never be flat, because that small pouch above my bikini line feels feminine and me.

And now, just in time, it’s betrayed me. It’s going to change. I don’t yet know how much. And, ironically, in a way my 2005 self would have been delighted with. The plan is to reconstruct my cancerous breast using fat from my stomach to match it with the other one (which, for the record, has always been my favourite). It’ll be my own tissue, naturally matched, and I’ll even get a bonus tummy tuck. A flat stomach and hopefully natural, sizable breasts? According to every women’s magazine from 2006, I should feel lucky.

And I do, mostly. My plastic surgeon, Georgina, is an angel - kind, intelligent, and simply brilliant (I’m referring to her as a sort of fairy godmother to friends!). Mum and I left the appointment speechless yet smiling. All my fear about the operation itself just... dissolved. Wish it was as easy to remove cancer.

The scar across my tummy will resemble a C-section and should fade in time. The new breast should soften and settle, and should eventually regain sensation. I’ve got a handful of tricks for keeping my hair during chemo, but even if I lose it, it’ll grow back - without split ends.

But I am dreading that final shower in the morning before surgery, where I’ll catch a glimpse in the mirror of the body that is every inch the one I know. You know when you have to call it quits on a relationship for practical reasons but there are still feelings there, which makes it sting so much more? That’s exactly how it feels. When I think about the breakup with my current body, the tears come streaming, but without any anger or resentment, just the ache of knowing I’ll miss it so terribly. I wanted to find an exact word for it and it turns out it exists in Portuguese: saudade. ”A sad state of intense longing for someone or something that is absent.”

However, now I’m nostalgic for the body I spent nearly three decades beating up, I am even more determined to refuse to beat up this new one. Because in thirty years it will be different again! It’ll be saggier, maybe spotted with age, but it will also be the body that beat cancer. One day, all of us will live in bodies that have changed beyond recognition - softened, scarred, and even reassembled - and we’ll look back at our current ones with the same impossible fondness we once saved for younger versions of ourselves.

And as for sexiness - as much as I once credited it entirely to my great rack - I’d like to point out that anyone who fancied it was, unknowingly, admiring something half-swimming with cancer. The new rack will be cancer-free, which sounds pretty fucking sexy! And sexiness doesn’t vanish with slight asymmetry. Would EmRata still be sexy with a scar on her left boob? Of course. Would anyone deny Angelina Jolie’s sexiness after her double mastectomy? Absolutely not.

For anyone going through the same, my friend George made a wonderful point: men are getting hair transplants using hair from the back of their head on their hairline, and everyone can see they look great. So what’s the difference in moving some fat around too? It will still look great!

So anyway. This has been written very quickly and cathartically because I’m having a really bad day right now. Bad days call for self indulgence, which comes in the form of a whiney Substack post and some Ben & Jerry’s later. I’ll polish and publish another day.

Thank you for reading. I really hope you are all kind to yourselves today.

x

Nearly two weeks of knowing I have cancer. And, every time I tell someone new, we cycle through the same clichés: one day at a time! It’s the not knowing that’s worst! You’ve got this! Stay strong! You could never be ugly! Thinking of you! Here if you need! Thoughts and prayers!

For someone who usually hates clichés, I’ve loved them all. Truly. Until someone hands me a “Live, Laugh, Love” mug, keep ‘em coming. They come from a good place. When I see the WhatsApp typing bubble, I even try to guess which one’s about to appear. Because this is what we say. They’re not unique - but neither is cancer! One in two people in the UK will get it at some point, and they’ll open the same texts, feel the same fear, the same love, the same despair, the same hope.

And what I’ve realised is that, alongside facing the fact there’s something inside me trying to kill me, the hardest parts of the past fortnight have, paradoxically, been the ones that show just how lucky I am. And dare I say it… glad it’s me?

Instead of the self-destructive “Why me?” - why not me? I’m young, I can handle it, I have no dependents, and I have friends who are with me every step of the way. I have a wonderful job I can put on hold, and family close by. I needed a new hairstyle eventually.

If cancer closed its eyes and threw a dart at a wall of faces, I’m glad it narrowly missed a single father, a child who hasn’t yet lived, or a woman, so similar to me, but living in a war zone without access to some of the world’s best healthcare.

I’m putting this in permanent cyber ink, so I have something to look back on when things feel darker than they should. And now, to the brief list of moments that hurt the most, because love and happiness were at the core:

#1

Telling my parents. They were in Portugal for my first appointment, and since I have a history of spoiling their holidays, I waited until the Wednesday after to break the news. I told my brother first as he’s been away, and I’d never seen him so shocked (except when Ipswich were promoted, although that was of course a very different vibe). To buy time, I said that I was working remotely from my sister-in-law’s because the office heating had broken, and also to meet her new kittens. I was proud! Such a well thought-out lie to protect them right up until the final second I had to tell them - the teenage years we spend deceiving them prepares us for this very moment, right?

Finally, I sat Mum and Dad down and did it, “I have breast cancer.”

Mum burst into tears instantly. Thankfully, all those summers at drama school paid off so I managed a convincing, “But I’m fine, I’m fine!” to calm her down. That was the hardest moment since the diagnosis: seeing how much she loved me, and how that love hurt her, which in turn hurt me. Dad, as expected, suggested making a cup of tea. How was I so lucky to get these two? Emotional and predictable. Exactly what I needed when my entire future was in the air.

#2

Telling work. One of the first things people ask is: “So how’s work handling it?”

Honestly? Like my dream job couldn’t be dreamier.

Andrea, my line manager, took me to my MRI and CT thorax scan before I’d even told my parents. She also whisked me out for breakfast the morning after my diagnosis. When one part of your life collapses but everything else holds steady, you realise you might not unravel after all.

Sophie, our CCO, has been just as brilliant. Having been through cancer herself, she checked in daily with advice, and even phoned the nurse to push for an earlier appointment. Could I be any luckier? To work for such incredible women, in a company prepared to support me with whatever I need? Our magazine is rooted in kindness, as is every senior member of staff. And it proved itself just when I needed it most.

#3

Cancelling plans. The sunny Friday pints I’d been looking forward to on 19th September turned into George and Carolina coming over and watching me cry for hours; Carolina soothing each wail with a reassuring fact from her doctor dad, and George puncturing each sob with an off-colour joke. (George, if you’re reading this: no, I’m not using my sob story to get you backstage with Doja Cat.)

Within a week I’d missed a birthday party, a flat-warming, a leaving do, and countless PR events. Each one reminded me how much life is still happening around me (sorry, back to clichés) - and that it won’t stop just because of some irritating 18mm tumour in my left breast, caught in my lymph nodes but not yet swimming anywhere else.

The only thing that must be delayed is the start of the World Cup, if I’m not cancer-free by Thursday 11 June 2026.

“It would be very unfair of me to say that,” she replied. “Because it’s definitely something.”

“Does it mean chemo?”

“We can’t rule anything out for the moment. But you will have the best treatment plan made just for you, put together by me and many other cancer specialists.”

Just for me. Me, Anna! The girl who now has to identify as someone with cancer. The girl who was partying the night before, holidaying the week before, and hiking the weekend before that. I want to still be that girl. I miss her already. As I write this, it’s been six days since I found out.

I remember so many colours from Friday 19th September. I wore a bright pink T-shirt and leopard-print shorts, thrown on quickly because it was the last hot day of summer. My group chat was buzzing with plans for sunny after-work pints, and I hoped to join after my appointment.

The hospital, of course, was blue and white. Kate, on the other hand, stood out in a coral and purple matching top and skirt, with perfectly paired purple heels. Just as I was about to compliment her outfit, she beat me to it: “I love your outfit, so colourful!”
“I was going to say the same about yours!” I replied.

She was reassuring as she examined me, explaining what they’d check and reminding me not to be alarmed if I was called back in person. “We don’t often give results over the phone because patients usually have more questions. It doesn’t necessarily mean malignancy, it just means we need to explain everything properly.”

Then came the ultrasound. I’ll never forget how the radiologist’s face drained of colour - the white-faced idiom now makes sense. I don’t remember her name, but I remember her kindness as she told me I’d need a mammogram before my biopsies. Another room. Then another, for a magnified image.

And then the biopsies. They were checking two lumps and my lymph nodes. Lymph nodes? That was the moment my eyes flooded as the nurse gave me anesthesia. She stroked my hand with her thumb - the way nurses do in films - and the radiologist asked if I needed a moment. “All good!” I lied, unsuccessfully blinking back tears.

Afterwards, I met Kate again. She explained they were more concerned than they had initially thought. Then came the conversation that began this story.

And then, the worst colour combination: yellow and blue. A yellow-floored, windowless room, its white walls broken only by a sad ocean painting. A table surrounded by blue chairs, a box of tissues, and leaflets on chemotherapy. As my friend George put it: “It’s the medical equivalent of being taken into a meeting room and seeing HR there.”

I was introduced to the “breast nurse,” who was there to answer my questions (I had none), and given a number to call if I wanted to talk.

And then I left. I texted my nearest and dearest - George, Carolina, my best friend Grace, and my sister-in-law Mary - and tried to prepare for this new chapter of my life.

Even though everything had changed, my boss Sophie said her husband put it in a great way when she found out she had breast cancer: “It doesn’t really make a difference. You have what you have. Finding out just means you can deal with it.”

I guess I’ve got a lot of dealing to do!