Dame Deborah James

In extracts from her book, How to Live when you Could be Dead, Dame Deborah James, who died from bowel cancer at the age of 40 in June, reveals how facing ...

Further tests revealed the tumour around her bile duct had grown in the four months she had stopped cancer treatment and had caused a blockage. Despite admitting in her last months that she was 'absolutely petrified a lot of the time', the host of the You, Me and The Big C podcast said she realised she was able to get through even the most terrifying aspects of her illness. When she received her diagnosis at the age of 35, Dame Deborah said she had 'no choice' but to look her greatest fear in the eye. Dame Deborah wrote in her book that she managed to have a lovely Christmas with her husband Seb and children Hugo, 14, and Eloise, 12, in 2021 before her health deteriorated She said the episodes would sometimes wake her up in the night with a feeling she was dying, The Sun reports. The broadcaster and campaigner, who died in June at the age of 40, has revealed in a book to be published posthumously that she lived with anxiety for 20 years.

Deborah James shared how her “anxiety levels dropped” following her 2016 cancer diagnosis in an excerpt from her posthumously published book, ...

"I had no choice any more — I had to look my biggest fear straight in the eye. Speaking about her Bowelbabe Fund organization, she told the outlet, "I always knew there was one thing I wanted to do before I died. "When I was forced to confront what I'd spent 20 years worrying about, something shifted in me," she added. "The worst happened and my fear was realized — I was told I had incurable cancer and that I would die," she wrote. "But instead, my anxiety levels dropped." But you don't quite realize how little time we have to suddenly organize things.