I’m grateful to Hilary Osborne for helping me understand why the Princess of Wales’s video left me so disquieted (Kate’s recovery is great news – but be wary of a soft-focus view of life after chemo, 11 September). I had stage 2, grade 2 invasive breast cancer last Christmas, with talk of chemotherapy after the tumour biopsy – until genomic testing gave me a reprieve. So I “got off lightly”, and need to “look on the bright side”, as some friends unhelpfully remind me.
There are some silver linings, but all cancer is crap. And even without chemotherapy, I still feel greyed-out. My heart aches for Kate, and broadly speaking I’m a royalist. But did her PR team really have to add so much saccharine? And now I feel just a bit more rubbish about myself and my failure to fully thrive after my own tough, but less tough, year.
Ali Hutchison
Dorchester, Dorset
