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I could not feel more sorry for Strictly’s Amy Dowden, who had a mastectomy in May 2023 and has now been called back for an emergency operation to remove her other breast. She doesn’t explain why on her Instagram post, but I can only assume this must be a preventative operation.
How awful for a young woman of 35, whose glittering career in dance depends on having a fit and healthy body. She will, she says, return to her Strictly family as soon as she can when she recovers from this next horrible surgery.
I know how she feels about the need to work as soon as possible after you’ve had to face something so frightening and unpleasant.
At 56, I was much older when it happened to me, but I felt the same urge to return to some form of normality via the job I loved. I gave myself a month off, then returned to Woman’s Hour.
Happily my job was mainly sitting down. I can’t imagine how Amy will cope with her recovery and dancing.
A mastectomy is a brutal operation but 20 years on, I’m still here. So there’s no doubt it’s worth it.
Those of us who know how horrid it can be must never discourage other women from going ahead if they’ve been diagnosed with cancer.
I’ll never forget the terrible shock of seeing the livid scar in the mirror for the first time. It was only a couple of days after the op and I was struck by the brutality of it. I wondered how a nice man like my surgeon, Professor Nigel Bundred, was able to simply pick up a scalpel and just cut. How ruthless did he have to be to maim and mutilate me in such a manner?
Strictly’s Amy Dowden, 35, who had a mastectomy in May 2023 and has now been called back for an emergency operation
Even now, all these years on, I avoid seeing myself naked in the mirror. Professor Bundred was brilliant with cancer, but could not pretend to be a plastic surgeon.
He persuaded me to have an implant so as not to be lopsided. It was inserted some time after the initial operation, but it still made a very tiny breast compared to the other one. I seem to recall him saying an implant shouldn’t be too large, but I’ve always had to stuff my bra to create anything remotely resembling a normal pair of breasts.
I became fascinated by the men who, on a daily basis, would walk into an operating theatre and slice away such an obviously feminine part of a woman’s body. When I made a documentary about breast cancer surgery for Radio 4, I persuaded Professor Bundred to allow me to watch him perform a mastectomy on another woman. Her name was Sue.
I am not remotely squeamish so had no fear of passing out at the sight of blood. I was more worried I’d feel angry at the sight of Sue, whom I’d got to know before the op, lying silent and asleep, offering herself to the scalpel. Sue’s face was completely hidden behind a screen and every part of her body was concealed by white sheets apart from her breast. It’s as if the surgeon needs to erase the familiar patient from his mind. His only concern is the part of the body from which he will do his best to remove any dangerous cancer and try to close it off neatly in preparation for later reconstruction.
I couldn’t take my eyes away for a moment. When the scalpel first sliced into the skin, my heart jumped as I thought, ‘Poor Sue will never be the same again.’ Then I quickly forgot the person under the knife – surprisingly little blood flowed – and found myself admiring the surgeon’s skill as he lifted away the skin, which would be preserved, from the inner contents of the breast.
The most fascinating part was the removal of the revolting inner contents of the breast.
The surgeon took out a really ugly lump of pink and yellow fat. I looked at it and thought: is that what a breast amounts to?
Is that the thing we all make such a fuss about? Is this what we want reduced or made bigger? The eternal do I like my breasts? Does he like my breasts? This is what I’m going to feed my babies with. Or not feed my babies because I don’t want them to go saggy!’
She didn’t explain why she was due for a second procedure on her Instagram post, but I can only assume this must be a preventative operation, writes Jenni Murray
Blah di blah di blah – on we go.
And that’s all it is, underneath there. I sort of felt, after that, that I didn’t miss mine quite so much.
Of course, that sentiment only goes so far. I was not tempted when Bundred suggested reducing my remaining breast to match up with the one that was gone. I knew any reduction would lose feeling in the nipple and I wasn’t prepared to give that up.
I have to confess that, even after all these years, when I tend not to be so obsessed by it, I can still catch sight of my mastectomy and feel, somehow, less of a woman.
And one has to wonder why, so many years after my operation, we still haven’t found a less brutal way of fixing the problem.
Is it because it’s primarily a woman’s problem – 55,000 women are diagnosed with breast cancer as opposed to 370 men?
If more men required the procedure, would surgeons have found a less life-changing solution?
It is estimated that 14,850 of the women diagnosed with breast cancer each year in the UK undergo a mastectomy. The US does twice as many and only France does fewer – but no woman should say no if she’s advised to have one.
It’s why I’m still here and why I fully expect to see Amy dancing in the next series of Strictly.
Lady Beckham sews the trousers
At last David Beckham achieved what he had longed for – a knighthood from the King. There can’t be many men who’ve appeared at such a formal and important occasion wearing a suit run up by their wife. It seems Lady Beckham really pulled her finger out.
- They say Holly Willoughby is to take over Strictly when Tess and Claudia leave. Please no, not another blonde bird with teeth. Holly’s everything I hate about the representation of women on TV.
I’m proof BBC has no class issue
I’m puzzled by the very posh (married to a baronet) presenter Sarah Montague, who says gender pay at the BBC is better, but class is now an issue.
Sarah had to fight for a £400,000 payout when she found her male colleagues on Today were paid much more than her. Her class doesn’t seem to have boosted her pay.
And I got on all right for a good many years as unashamedly working class. Unfortunately, the successful fights for equal pay as a woman came a little after my time.
Protect this vital right for women
What’s the point of the Supreme Court’s ruling that sex is biological and women must have their own spaces? Female-only Newnham College, Cambridge, is flouting the decision by admitting trans women as students.
It was co-founded in 1871 by suffragist Millicent Garrett Fawcett, who fought tirelessly for the education of women. Women had to fight for girls’ secondary education, too. We forget how hard women have had to fight for the right to an education at our peril.
