Last year, the day before Amy Dowden’s honeymoon, she felt a lump in her breast. Immediately, she knew. In that intuitive way you can tell when something’s different about your own body, it wasn’t a moment she could brush off. “I just felt a bit sick to my stomach,” the now 34-year-old Strictly Come Dancing regular tells the camera. “So I saw the doctor and he said: ‘Amy, it’s not good news – we’ve found something.’ And I just said: ‘Is it cancer?’ And he just said: ‘Yes.’”
Strictly Amy: Cancer and Me, the BBC’s new documentary on the professional dancer’s cancer story, is a result of the fact that as soon as she received the diagnosis, she invited a team to start filming in the hope that it might raise some awareness about the disease. The real-time effect is exceedingly raw. You feel as if you are on this journey with her, and don’t know where it might go. “My first thought when I had to tell Strictly was, ‘Keep my job,’” she says, her face crumpling, her hands reaching up to rub her eyes. “Because that was the scariest thing.” Looking back, she later says, her earlier fears seemed naive.
