Dame Esther Rantzen has revealed that her oncologist has told her she’ll die “sometime in the next 10 years”. The 83-year-old journalist and Childline founder announced that she’d been diagnosed with stage four lung cancer in May.
Chatting to Alex Jones on BBC’s The One Show, Esther updated viewers on her condition. When Alex asked where she was currently at, Esther said: “I did say to my oncologist, when am I going to die, and he said: ‘Sometime in the next 10 years.’ But how soon, how late, I do not know.”
She added: “It does concentrate on your mind to be told that you have stage four lung cancer. You do think, wait a minute, I’ve got less time than maybe I had assumed so you prioritise. As much as I love it and as much as I respect people who wanted to die working, for me I didn’t want to die working.”
