The moment my appearance changed forever – and thank god it did

I was in my hotel room getting ready to go downstairs and join a dear friend’s 40th birthday party when it started. My hair was falling out and there was no mistaking the clumps of it in the sink. The chemo I was going through to keep me alive having had breast cancer had caught up with me, and I was pretty devastated. Would I need to wear a wig? Will it ever grow back properly? These were just two of the questions that raced around my mind while my husband sat patiently waiting for me to emerge ready for the night ahead. My appearance had already changed – I’d undergone a single mastectomy and despite the excellent reconstruction work and judicious wearing of different bras, I knew I looked different which somehow didn’t bother me as much. That breast had cancer in it and I was glad it was gone. I didn’t really give a stuff about whether I looked lopsided, I was alive and I was going to see my boys grow up. I remember my first holiday abroad after treatment – I went with a group of friends and their children who’d supported me and my family over the previous year. I chose to wear a triangular pad in one side of my swimming costume in order to look “equal” and I worded my husband to keep an eye out in case it moved and I hadn’t noticed. Such tiny things became so important because it was all about trying to regain some confidence in my body which had been scarred by the surgery. For every woman who has had a mastectomy, there is a story about how they coped with their body changing and how that affected their identity. Marie-France van Heel knows all about it. She’s a Cambridge graduate, has a hugely successful career in marketing, is a mother of three, and speaks three languages. Oh, and her husband is our new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham. Her sister Claire died of breast cancer in 2006 in her late thirties. Her mother Bea and her sister Louise were also diagnosed with the disease. Van Heel was dealing with this devastation in her life, and helping to care for Claire’s children, when tests showed she had the BRCA1 gene, which meant she had a far higher chance of getting breast cancer herself. She decided to undergo a pre-emptive double mastectomy. She was still only 40. As Burnham told The Daily Mirror at the time: “As hard as it was to take, the decision was liberating rather than depressing because it’s lifted the cloud of fear. She did what she did because she’d seen the devastation breast cancer had caused to her sisters and mother.” A decade and a half later, I stood in Downing Street to report on Andy Burnham’s first words as Prime Minister as Van Heel stood proudly by her husband, and I wondered about the – and forgive me for using this word – “journey” Van Heel had been on: what she must have felt like the first time she went to an official function, a family get-together, a proper party with friends knowing that yes, she was alive, but she looked and probably felt different. I wondered if she, like I did on that first post-cancer family holiday in France, worried about wearing a costume and going swimming? I look back on some of my old TV shows when I am very obviously wearing a wig and they make me smile, but also make me feel proud of what I came through and where I am now. You know that everyone who cares about you will be compassionate and understanding if you’re not feeling as confident as you once did – that you’re a little bit self-conscious. It’s probably – and I’m guessing here – a little different when you’re standing outside No 10 with millions of people here and around the world looking at you. They’re not all going to be your friends; they won’t all be full of love and consideration for what you’ve endured. I’ll admit I wasn’t surprised to see some of the hugely unkind comments on social media, led by former BBC presenter Liz Kershaw, about how Van Heel looked on that day. It was depressing to see the usual crowd of misogynists being joined by women – and with some of them only rowing back when they found about her double mastectomy. In the podcast I make with the Future Dreams breast cancer charity, I’ve interviewed women about body image and learning to feel good about yourself again. What we all agreed on, and perhaps this is the case with Van Heel, was that ultimately we don’t give two hoots about what people think of us, or of the dresses we choose to wear. Because we know there was a chance our lives could have been cut short – and that gives us an incredible perspective. In the end, mindless trolls won’t take away what matters most for the Burnham household – that none of their achievements would be possible without Van Heel making that life-changing decision all those years ago. Thank God she did.