What do you do when you receive the most devastating news of your life? Deborah Hutton decided to write a book full of practical ideas about how friends can help. Here, with contributions from Ruby Wax, Alastair Campbell,
Jade Goody, Sam Taylor-Wood and many others, she reveals how to cope with cancer.
I count myself the luckiest and unluckiest woman in London. The luckiest because I have a great husband, a fabulous family with kids on track and growing up, a beautiful house, more friends than I deserve and as much interesting work as I want. This time a year ago, I'd put the dog on the lead and walk over to the local shops in the sunshine, marvelling at my own good fortune, thinking I wouldn't swap places with anyone in the world.
Then, at a stroke, this lovely run of luck ran out. On 26 November 2004, at the age of 'just' 49-and-a-half, which my kids think is ancient but seems pretty young to me, I discovered that the irritating, niggly cough I had had for the past two months was no trivial chest infection but an aggressive adenocarcinoma that had already spread well beyond the organ of origin - my lungs - to my bones, lymph nodes and possibly my liver as well. The irony of my situation was apparent to everyone who knew me. I was never ill, never down, a runner of half-marathons, and a yoga freak and nutrition nut to boot.
I knew how to look after myself big time. After all, it was my job. I had been writing about women's health for more than a quarter of a century, first as health editor of Vogue and then for a range of magazines and newspapers. I was the published author of not one but four books about preventive health. Since giving up smoking 23 years ago, I had joined the ranks of those fanatically intolerant antismoking ex-smokers. And yet here I now was, struck down by lung cancer, with its serves-you-right stigma.
Faced with the facts of my unenviable situation, it was hard not to feel incredulous. I looked like a well woman - and with the exception of the cough, and the recurrent one-sided headaches, and the pain in my left hip, and the three-quarters of a stone that had unaccountably tumbled off since September, I felt a well woman. How could I have a stage IV cancer that, even now, was racing round my body, invading my vital organs, threatening to kill me? And quite soon by all accounts. 'Don't look up your cancer on the internet,' my consultant warned me just before backing out of my side-room at University College Hospital. 'You'll only terrify yourself.'
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