It can be a mistake to ask someone how they discovered they had breast cancer. One woman I know found it during an illicit tryst; another as she was stripping off to go skinny dipping. Lauren Mahon, though, has no qualms revealing how she found her lump. “I was masturbating,” she says. “I grabbed my breast and went, ‘Oh my God – what’s that?’”
As a healthy 31-year-old with no family history of the disease, she had never had cancer on her radar. “I didn’t check my breasts – I didn’t think I needed to worry.” When she went to A&E to get it checked out – the only way she could see a doctor as she had recently moved out of her parents’ home and hadn’t yet registered with a GP – she was told she was almost certainly fine and she put it out of her mind. It was only when her mum asked her if she’d got a referral to see a specialist that she finally did see the GP, and got an appointment at the breast clinic.
As it turned out, Mahon had stage three cancer. She went from being, as she puts it, “on the crest of a new life”, moving out of her family home and starting a new job, to chaos. “My world as I knew it fell out of my arse,” she says. This is classic Lauren-speak: she tells it like it is. It is what her millions of listeners love her for: when she recovered from a gruelling 18 months of chemotherapy, surgery (she had a lumpectomy) and radiotherapy, she set up a new kind of no-holds-barred podcast on cancer, You, Me and the Big C. Her co-hosts were two other women who also had first-hand experience of the disease: Rachael Bland, who was dealing with breast cancer when the podcast launched in early 2018, and Dame Deborah James, who had bowel cancer and would become widely known for her blog and Instagram account Bowelbabe.
Their podcast rewrote the lexicon of cancer-speak: there was no tiptoeing around the issues, no euphemisms like “battling” or “fighting” the disease and certainly no platitudes. Mahon, Bland and James told it how it was, however devastating, however difficult the latest news. It was about how they coped with losing their hair and how they told their kids about their diagnoses; it was about where they wanted to die and their fears that things might get worse. It was about their relationships with their doctors, partners and friends, and about having your eyebrows microbladed before you started chemo, so you could look into the mirror and see a face that still resembled your own.
It wasn’t just about the cancer; it was about how to have a life and make it count.
You, Me and the Big C became a chart-topping award-winner, but no amount of accolades could make up for the loss of Bland, who died in September 2018, a few months into the programme, and James, who followed in June 2022, a month after she was made a Dame for her awareness-raising work around cancer. Mahon, James and Bland’s widower, Steve, continued the podcast after Bland’s death, but after James’s death, she and Steve made their final episode last January. They want the podcast to continue as a “public service”, she said at the time, but “we don’t feel like it is for us to continue it”.
Of course it is incredibly tough to be the sole survivor of the original three women: not only has Mahon had to grieve the loss of two of her closest friends, but “part of me thinks it’s going to come and get me as well”. Still, the work goes on – this week she launches a new campaign with Girl vs Cancer, the charity she founded, about sex for people who have or have had cancer called Cancer Won’t Be the Last Thing That F*cks Me. According to the campaign materials, nine in 10 people experience some sort of sexual dysfunction after they are diagnosed with cancer, compared with three or four in 10 in the non-cancer population. And yet, a third of women report not being given any information before treatment about the potential sexual side effects of having cancer.
“It feels as though you’re no longer deemed a sexual being,” after being diagnosed, she says. “It’s just: be grateful you’re alive. It boils my piss, that’s the only way I can describe it. Because think about what really matters in life, what your aspirations are. For most of us, it’s having a home where we feel happy and safe; having a career we enjoy; and having a loving and caring relationship.”
Reconnecting with your body sexually can be a big part of the healing process when you have cancer. But it’s not just a question of going back to where you started once the treatment is over. “All of a sudden my body felt very vulnerable and for someone to enter into my body felt quite scary,” she says. Everyone who goes on dating apps risks being, as she puts it, “fucked and ducked”, but that’s especially difficult to cope with when you have just survived cancer. “Everyone deserves safe sexual intimacy, but the cancer community isn’t getting that,” she says. “Are the conversations happening? Often, they’re not.”
For anyone who has had cancer and is back on the dating scene, there will come a point where you need to talk about it to a new partner. For Mahon, that point comes early on in a date. She will be asked what she does, she will say she is a cancer activist, and suddenly: “I’m no longer a hot date – I’m an inspiration. That’s how it feels. I stop feeling like a sexy woman and I start feeling as if I’m giving a Ted Talk. And they’re so inspired but I’m like, ‘I just want you to bend me over later, babes.’”
At the root of this story is what Mahon and I both know is the othering of people with cancer: the idea that you are somehow “different” or “unlucky”, that you inhabit an alternative world. Well, wrong, wrong and wrong. Mahon had cancer in her 30s; I have had cancer in my 50s; and one in two of you reading this will get cancer, too. Cancer incidence overall has risen by 40% since 2002, and by 19% in the last decade alone. Although it is most likely to happen to you in old age, it’s more common than it used to be in younger people – especially among women under 50, who are twice as likely as men to get it (although they are more likely to survive it).
That’s the bad news. The good news is that cancer is much more survivable than it used to be. More people, like Mahon and me, are living cancer-free years on from our diagnoses: she is six years clear, and I’m nine. Many others, far more than in the past, are living full lives alongside a cancer that will never be cured, but can be managed – about 130,000 people are estimated to be in that situation in the UK, and some stay that way for many years. Despite that 40% increase in cases, deaths from cancer in the same period have gone up by only 7%. If you were told in the early 1970s that you had cancer, you’d have a 50% chance of being alive in a year; today, you’d have the same chance of being around in a decade.
Unfortunately, general perceptions seem to be lagging behind scientific advances. It’s not quite as bad as in my grandfather’s day – he died of cancer without the word ever being mentioned in our family – but it’s a long way from reflecting the reality. I remember being shocked by people who clearly thought I was somehow different, that I was probably going to die quite soon, because I had cancer; but the truth is, I might have felt the same about someone else before it happened to me.
It’s this othering that we have to change if we are to build better cancer care, Mahon believes. It’s about everyone – doctors and nurses, employers and colleagues, parents in the playground, friends and family – taking on board that where you are now, they may one day be; and where you are now, you will not always be. And that means understanding that, just because someone has cancer – even if they’re living with it, rather than being cured – doesn’t mean they’re not having a full and interesting life, including sexually. “Your intimate life is such a bedrock of your humanity,” says Mahon. But “there’s not enough support. Where there is support it’s mostly clinical; it’s not about the emotional aspects.” And sex is definitely still on the agenda for people with cancer: “I know people with stage four, living with the disease, and living well – and they still want to have sex. When you think about rebuilding your life, that’s part of it. Cancer is just a few cells in your body trying very hard to kill you – and while that’s not happening, you have a life to live.”
Changing the conversation in the new cancer landscape means taking a properly holistic approach. “You’re on a conveyor belt. Your body is having an MOT, it’s getting fixed, but everything is impacted – your relationships, your self-identity, your work, your lifestyle, your financial situation, your sex life … there are so many nuances to a cancer diagnosis.” What she wants to do, she says, is empower the individual: one of her catchphrases is “people not patients” and another is “you’re not a victim”. She would also like to see employees given proper paid leave and a pathway through treatment and return to work – a bit like the protocols around parental leave when it’s done right. After 18 months of treatment and a medical menopause, she “turned up back to my job and there wasn’t even a welcome – I just slunk back in”.
Six years on, though, Mahon says if she could turn the clock back, she wouldn’t change her cancer story – other than to wish she had been more quickly diagnosed, because then the treatments might have been easier. Of course, she says, “that’s easier to say because I’m living beyond it”. But when she looks back to before, she can see that “the life I had then was comfortably numb. I felt more of a victim of my life than a master of my own destiny.” Today, she says, “I’m making decisions that mean my life works for me rather than being stuck in a hamster wheel. Once you’ve had cancer, your perception of the world totally shifts, and you can’t go back”.
This is my experience, too. There is no returning to how things were, but there is a life beyond, a life where I hardly even think about having had cancer, even though every day I live is different because of it. I’m loving that life. Mahon says she’d love it too – James was always telling her that that was the life she should embrace. Why, then, does she stay inside the cancer bubble, where there’s so much trauma, so much sadness (the day after our interview, she’s going to the funeral of a young friend who has died of the disease)? It’s not that I’m not grateful she is doing it – because there really is so much to do and it takes someone to do it – but what about her?
The truth is, she doesn’t want to do this for ever. Indeed, she is developing her own new podcast, which isn’t about cancer – she’ll be interviewing celebrities about the nicknames they use, and why. But she always wants to be involved in the legacy of You, Me and the Big C, and she’s immensely proud of doing her bit to keep the work going that James, Bland and she did. “Although we’re not together, in terms of legacy we are together,” she says. “I’m embedded in the cause: we always brought different things to the table.” She thinks of her much-loved mates, she says, as her “guardian angels”, and she’s counting on them to help her get through the next two years, because she has always had a fear she won’t make it past 40 – and that is the age both James and Bland were when they died.
“But I will get to 40, and I will get to 41 – and I can pass on the baton, and I can go on being Lauren. That will be my legacy: the fact that I didn’t have to die to leave one.”
• For more information and resources visit girlvscancer.co.uk
