The Coward of the County (And other insults to throw at Cancer)

Long term readers of this blog will no doubt remember Lisa Magill, AKA “Terminally Fabulous”. Lisa wrote a superb blog about her cancer struggle which was followed by thousands of people all over the world. Lisa died in March 2017. She was the first cancer sufferer I started following after I was diagnosed, there have been a few others in the time since, but none had the impact that Lisa had. That was until I came across a blog / podcast called “You, Me and the Big C” written by Deborah James, Lauren Mahon and Rachel Bland, the podcasts brought the day to day of living with cancer into the homes of millions of listeners. They are funny, they are sad, they are truthful. You’ll laugh, cry and think if you download the podcasts, which I really encourage you to do.

Rachel is probably best known as a BBC Radio presenter and news reader. She worked closely with Richard Bacon and Tony Livesey on late night shows, before gravitating to slightly more sociable hours.

The three podcast presenters all have one thing in common, they all have cancer in one form or another.

I started to follow Rachel on Twitter back in 2017 and made a right fool of myself by getting confused as to who was Rachel Hodges and who was Rachel Bland. She straightened me out by explaining Hodges was her maiden name. What an idiot I felt. We had a few Twitter exchanges over the next 18 months or so, and Rachel made some very kind comments about my blog.

Rachel knew that her cancer was terminal. In August she started writing about her life so that her young son would have something to remember her by.

On Tuesday of this week she released a statement on social media that her time was nearly up. On Wednesday at 11am Radio 5Live announced that she’d died peacefully with her family around her that morning. Rachel was very much part of the Radio 5Live family, I’ve no idea how the presenters managed to keep it together. Tony Livesey presented the Drive Time show that afternoon, he had the listeners in tears of laughter and sadness with the stories he regaled about his time presenting with Rachel. 

Rachel didn’t talking about passing away, or being taken, she talked openly about dying. She talked about the total bastard that cancer is. She put the can into cancer.

The two remaining members of the podcast have vowed to continue to spread the word and to continue the great work they’ve been doing with Rachel.

I hadn’t planned to blog this week. Rachel died and I reckon conservatively another 3,400 people will have also died this week from cancer in the UK. They won’t have received the publicity (that’s the wrong word, but I can’t think of the right one), but they’ll all have families grieving over a loved one who’s died.

Cancer will be beaten, probably not in my life time, but it will be beaten. Cowards never prosper in the end.

As always, thanks for reading.

To be continued……………

#Shoulder2Shoulder