Fiona's story

Seven years ago Gab, a lifelong friend, was diagnosed with breast cancer. After battling hard through numerous operations,chemotherapy and radiotherapy her cancer has repeatedly returned and is now in her liver. She’s been given an "incurable" diagnosis, but she hasn’t given up hope and is looking further afield to Germany, where a pioneering treatment has helped others in her situation to recover from their cancer. This isn’t available on the NHS. 

On 5 September 2015, myself and another friend, Sara, swam the Dart River 10km race in Devon – a huge personal challenge, though nothing in comparison with what Gab has been through – to start the fundraising, and we are all hugely grateful that so many people have donated so far. We are planning another, bigger swim in September 2016 - 6 swims (totalling 15km) and 6 walks (totalling 10km) across and between the Scilly Isles! Please read Gab’s story, and help if you can. 

Gabrielle's story

Hi, my name’s Gabrielle (Gab) Starkey and for the past 7 years I’ve been battling breast cancer. 

Before all this started, in 2008, I was living in London with my partner and 3-year-old son, working for The Times, writing previews for the TV desk. My relationship was rocky, but otherwise life was good. Then came the grenade that blew all of it to pieces - a diagnosis of breast cancer at just 38 (the most common age for a woman to be diagnosed in the UK is 69). Within weeks, I had a radical mastectomy (the first of many operations). My relationship disintegrated. I took extended sick leave from my beloved job and moved, with my bewildered son, up to the Midlands to be nearer my family and start chemo and radiation therapy. My prognosis wasn’t good, I was told. The cancer was aggressive and had already spread into 11 out of the 16 lymph glands they’d removed from my underarm. My oncologist thought I’d be lucky to see 10 years. My mum and step-dad, who lived in Cyprus, moved back to help look after me.

All of this was pretty devastating, and I dealt with it with stoicism and denial. Looking back, I think it was all way too much to process properly at the time. I just concentrated on getting through the treatment. The chemo and radiation were successful, and in 2009 I had my left breast reconstructed using a muscle and skin graft from my back. But soon after, in 2010, another lump appeared in the scar tissue and the whole cycle started again - biopsy, surgery, chemo (no radio this time - it’s so damaging to the tissues that you can’t have it in the same place twice). 

In May 2011, hoping against hope that the cancer was now all gone, I used what was left of my redundancy money from The Times to start my own business, setting up a local parenting magazine. For two years I worked away at building the business, but in early 2013 I started to feel more tired than normal, and I seemed to be forgetting things and making a lot of mistakes at work. When another lump popped up - this time in my groin - I was gutted but not really surprised. But my sister was due to get married in September, and I was going to be Maid of Honour - doing that without hair was out of the question. I had surgery to remove the lump, but put off chemo and radiotherapy until after the wedding. Chemo took me through to the start of 2014, when I sadly sold my business, followed by another 15 rounds of radio, which left me with a deep, weeping wound in my groin (nice!), which took weeks to heal.

The fact that the cancer had spread to another part of my body meant it was now Stage 4, or metastatic, which is classed as incurable. With my business gone, I focused on looking after my son, who’d been diagnosed with autism and ADHD. Throughout the whole of my cancer “journey” I’ve tried my best to be stoic, but for the first time I began to feel really sorry for myself. The “incurable” diagnosis made me feel particularly hopeless - I felt the full weight of my mortality dragging me down, as if death was inevitable, and just around the corner. Luckily, I managed to get some counselling from the local hospice, which really helped me to come to terms with it. But at Christmas 2014 I learned that there were lesions on my liver, and that I needed more chemo. After 6 sessions, in May 2015, a scan showed that the 3 lesions had shrunk to just one. But I was feeling terrible - really exhausted all the time, a stone overweight, with no hair, eyebrows or eyelashes, and a numbness and tingling in my hands and feet caused by peripheral neuropathy - nerve damage from the chemo. I was pretty depressed, but my oncologist recommended another two rounds to try to see off the last liver lesion. Thankfully the chemo ended in July, and I’m currently waiting for the results of a CT scan, to find out if all the lesions are gone.

While doing all this conventional treatment, I’ve spent a lot of time researching alternatives that don’t cause the sort of side-effects that I’ve found so debilitating. And amazingly I started to come across stories of people who’d cured their Stage 4 cancer. Online, I followed an American woman called Kris Carr, who made a film called Crazy Sexy Cancer about her quest to treat her own cancer naturally, and read an amazing book called Radical Remission, about people who’d healed themselves and how they’d done it. I discovered that clinics in America and Europe (particularly Germany) are having great success using complementary treatments alongside conventional ones, and that Britain is really behind in this aspect of cancer treatment. I discovered the charity Yes to Life, which is committed to helping UK cancer patients access these newer, more holistic, therapies, and spoke to Patricia Peat of Cancer Options, who gave me a lot of information about treatments that might be good for me. And then I came across Fiona Shakeela Burns, from Bristol, who had healed her own Stage 4 ovarian cancer, and went to see her. She put me on a healing, detoxing diet, which has really helped to rebuild my strength and positive outlook after chemo. 

Having learnt all this, I really don’t want to have any more traditional chemo, no matter what the scan results say. I feel like I need to build up my body and immune system, and that poisoning it with chemo just knocks me down and leaves my body less able to fight the cancer afterwards. The basic argument of the holistic approach to cancer is that you need to change the terrain of the body, to make it inhospitable to cancer, rather than just attacking the tumours, which are the symptoms, not the cause of the disease - this just rings true to me. Chemo may have slowed my cancer down, but it has always come back. This time round, I want to do as many holistic treatments as I need to to actually cure myself. We all have cancer cells in our bodies, which are usually mopped up by our immune systems. For some reason, my immune system isn’t doing its job properly, so I need to find out why and fix the problem - then my health will return. 

Unfortunately none of these treatments are available on the NHS or covered by my health insurance, and they all cost money. If more tumours are found on my scan, I might need medical treatment in Germany costing up to £40,000; if not, I will still need to implement a regime of therapies in this country (such as oxygen therapy and infrared saunas, plus lorry-loads of supplements and organic food) to detox and boost my immune system. I really believe this is my best option to try and regain my health. My oncologist has no hope of curing me, but I do, following in the footsteps of people who have already done it. I am an optimistic, strong-willed person and I want - more than anything - to see my son grow up. He’s already had to endure watching his mum go through four courses of chemo - something no 10-year-old should have to do. I am totally indebted to Fiona and Sara for kicking off my fundraising with their incredible swim, and I thank anyone who can make a donation, however small. You will be making a great difference to my life and my son’s, and I am so grateful. Thank you.

Why the donations are going to Yes to Life

The charity Yes to Life is administering the money for me, and will make sure it is only paid out towards alternative and complimentary treatments or consultations, or costs associated with them.  This is to guarantee that I'm a) not getting an income from this and b) not spending the money on a big telly! Any money that is left over once I'm cured will go to the charity, to help them help others in similar circumstances.