Daill Mail - 08.08.2019

Page 32

Decision: Jane Hill on TV yesterday

By Jennifer Ruby Senior

Showbusiness Correspondent

Newsreader

Jane: I had a

mastectomy in

cancer battle

BBC newsreader Jane Hill has

revealed she had a mastectomy

last year after she was diagnosed

with breast cancer.

She opted not to have reconstruc-

tive surgery following the operation

because she did not want to be given

anaesthetic or go under the knife.

Miss Hill, 50, who regularly appears on

the BBC News Channel, disappeared

from screens in November after she was

diagnosed with the illness – but didn’t

explain her absence until May.

She said she didn’t want to ‘start talk-

ing about it on social media’ in case ‘there

was a hiccup’ in her treatment, and added

that she felt it ‘wasn’t right’ for her to

make public updates on her progress.

‘I left work at the end of November. You

just don’t know how it’s going to go. You

hope the operation is going to go well,’

she told ITV’s Lorraine yesterday. ‘My

surgeon was amazing. On the day of my

diagnosis what she made me do was walk

away thinking about all the positives in

my case.’ She added: ‘I was super lucky.’

The newsreader had a mastectomy in

November but decided against recon-

structive surgery. She said of her deci-

sion: ‘It wasn’t right for me, a reconstruc-

tion requires multiple surgeries. I do have

a massive great scar across my chest.’

The Sussex-born broadcaster, who lives

in north London with her partner of ten

years, Sara Shepherd, credited her good

health with aiding her speedy recovery.

was a lot of dark humour in our house.’

She previously told how she struggled

with a lack of lesbian role models when

she was growing up, because being gay

‘wasn’t part of the conversation’.

Miss Hill returned to work at the end of

May and informed fans that she had been

recovering in a series of tweets.

She wrote: ‘Overwhelmed by so many

lovely back-to-work messages. I just want

to say that my return wouldn’t have been

possible without our NHS.’

She thanked the ‘numerous’ NHS staff

who had ‘spotted my breast cancer,

treated it, and continue to look after me’.

‘Return impossible

without the NHS’

‘Having lived a healthy lifestyle helped

with my recovery,’ she said. ‘I’m a regular

gym-goer and I definitely realised with

hindsight it has helped my recovery. Eat-

ing broccoli for 25 years has helped.’

Miss Hill said her cancer diagnosis came

at the same time her partner’s mother

learned that she had the disease – dou-

bling the stress on their family. ‘Her

[Sara’s] mum was also diagnosed with

cancer in the same month I was, so there

(^) Daily Mail, Thursday, August 8, 2019
awards and Liv got a BAFTA nomination for
best supporting actress. She took her mum
to the ceremony. Within a month of finishing
the drama, she was filming the lead role in
Jellyfish, which won her more rave reviews
and prizes at the Edinburgh International
Film Festival and a French film festival.
Then she played a serving girl opposite
Charlotte Rampling in the film adaptation of
Sarah Waters’s novel The Little Stranger.
That won her a London Critics’ Circle
nomination for best young performer. Now
she will appear opposite film and theatrical
legend Glenda Jackson.
‘I feel incredibly lucky to be working along-
side such experienced and talented actors,
especially Glenda Jackson,’ she says.
Meanwhile, her father, 48, has achieved a
kind of peace. ‘My improvement is through
the arts,’ he says. ‘I am the living proof of
the generation of new neural pathways.
Every day is a little bit better.’
He has a new quote to live by. ‘Theodore
Roosevelt said “comparison is the thief of
joy”. I had wasted so much energy comparing
myself post injury to my old self, to others
who were never injured and to those who
have different kinds of injuries.
‘I have stopped doing that. I have to be
content with who I have become.’
On the tenth anniversary ‘of the worst day
of my life’, he visited Wendy Laws, the
mother of Private Robbie Laws, whom he
had not seen for several years.
‘I’m told that after I came out of the coma,
I would ask how Robbie was and they would
say ‘‘he’s dead’’ and I would start to cry.
‘And the next day I would wake and
ask the same question again and the same
thing would happen. That went on for
several days. I am proud that I cared for
my soldiers.
‘In the last few months I have come to feel
I am using the ‘‘energies’’ that were lost by
those soldiers who were killed that day.
‘I am using their energy. It would be a
dishonour to them if I forgot that.’
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