Lauren Jolly runs a busy life between her job as the head of buying for a women’s wear retailer and her role at home as a wife to Matt and mother of Jack, seven, and Rhys, five. In 2023, Towcester-based Lauren’s life slowed down significantly when the then 38-year-old was diagnosed with cervical cancer.
“We walked into the room, and my doctor introduced us to a Macmillan nurse, so I instantly knew it was about to be bad news,” Lauren remembers. “In the space of a week, I had a PET scan, an MRI scan, and then a CT scan.”
Lauren discovers symptoms
Lauren had always been someone who was on top of her smear tests. “I grew up during the era of Jade Goody, so there was probably more awareness in my age group because she was a huge celebrity who died of cervical cancer,” she explains. “I’d always been really religious about my smear tests, I was never late for them. I was even early one month; they canceled it because it was too soon.”
In 2020, Lauren went for her scheduled smear test and had a letter come through that said that she had abnormal cells and Human Papillomavirus (HPV). “That was the first time I’d ever heard of HPV and [was told] that I would be referred for a colposcopy for them to check that there was nothing wrong,” she remembers.
© Lauren JollyDue to the COVID-19 lockdown, Lauren’s appointment was postponed. Concerned about the abnormal cells, Lauren went privately for the colposcopy and a biopsy too.
“They didn’t see anything unduly worrying. Standard practice is that they refer you to be seen again a year later and then if there’s any cause for concern, they do a process where they remove some of the cells just to make sure it doesn’t turn cancerous,” she explains.
Her smear came back clear in 2021, but by summer 2023, Lauren had started to notice some abnormal bleeding between her periods.
“I’d always had really regular periods. At the time, I put it down to stress,” Lauren says. “I was doing a busy job commuting to London. I had two small children, we’d obviously been through COVID. I’d recently gone back to work. The boys were both in nursery. There was a lot of rushing around to pick them up.”
© Lauren JollyLauren also wondered if she had entered perimenopause. “I started to track in my head when it was happening. I started noticing the pattern and I just felt like it wasn’t hormone related. It was more related to my bladder and bowel, which made me think that something was pressing on something,” she recalls.
Wanting to be on the safe side, Lauren went to the GP in August. She was examined by a doctor who didn’t believe she had cancer but referred her on the urgent cancer two-week pathway all the same. By October, she had had six biopsies and a colposcopy before jetting off on a week-long holiday that she and her family had been looking forward to.
© Lauren JollyWith no family history of gynae cancers, Lauren had no reason to believe she was going to be diagnosed with the disease two years before her 40th birthday.
Lauren receives a cancer diagnosis
Upon returning from her holiday, Lauren noticed that she had received an email from her doctor asking her to come in the next day for an in-person appointment. “My husband came with me to the appointment and he was adamant that I didn’t have cancer,” Lauren says. She, however, had her suspicions confirmed by the doctor who said she had cervical cancer which was believed to be stage one.
“[This] meant that they would go ahead with a radical hysterectomy, which is where they remove your womb, tubes, top of the cervix, top part of the vagina and pelvic lymph nodes so they can check to see if it’s moved to anywhere else in your body, and all of the tissues surrounding it, and then they send it off for testing.”
Lauren decided, with the help of her Macmillan nurse Leslie, to keep her ovaries in the hope of having a natural menopause. “They did the surgery at the start of December 2023. It was weird because I was really nervous about the surgery, but I was also really excited to get the cancer out of my body,” she says.
© Lauren Jolly“I’d never had surgery. I’d never been put out, so it all felt really new, but I think you go into overdrive when you’re diagnosed with cancer because you just have to battle through all these different things that are thrown at you.” [can you paraphrase this quote]
Lauren busied herself preparing for Christmas ahead of her surgery, which was booked for 11 December. “I knew that I was going to be in hospital for a few days and then I wouldn’t really be able to do anything,” Lauren recalls. “Aside from making sure the boys were looked after, protected, and ready for Christmas, I just wanted the cancer out of me.”
Lauren starts treatment
The next seven months were gruelling for Lauren. After her surgery, she went to stay with her parents to recover and wait for her results to come in to check for a clear margin around everything that they’ve removed. “We had Christmas in between, which was helpful because it distracted from waiting for the results,” she recalls. Lauren waited for five weeks before getting some tough news.
© Lauren Jolly“I got the results that I needed to have further treatment,” she says, remembering how she started chemotherapy and radiotherapy just two months after surgery. She had a six-hour session of chemotherapy every Wednesday and radiotherapy Monday to Friday for six weeks.
“I had a small break, and then I had brachytherapy, which is an internal radiotherapy,” she says. “It was probably the one I dreaded the most. I finished my treatment in mid April, then I had to wait three months because radiotherapy could take a little while to work just to then scan and make sure that actually all of the cancer was definitely gone, which it was. I got those results in July.” [can you paraphrase this quote]
Braving cancer treatment
Lauren’s treatment was a rollercoaster of emotions. “Everyone always says that you don’t really take in what they’re saying when they diagnose you with cancer. But I honestly could tell you that meeting with the doctor word for word, because I was expecting him to say it,” she says.
“What I found the hardest was that my husband really wasn’t expecting it. My parents definitely weren’t, and delivering that news to your mum and dad is just so hard. Even now, the stuff that still gets me is what everyone else has had to go through alongside me.”
“My instant worry was how we could protect the boys from it because I didn’t want it to be hard for them,” she adds. ” I knew that there was the risk of my elder son going into school and him saying, ‘My mummy’s got cancer’ and someone else coming back with, ‘My such and such died of that’ because that’s the reality of the disease.”
© Lauren JollyLauren also struggled with eating and feeling exhausted throughout her treatment. “The combination of the radiotherapy and the chemo did then stop my ovaries from working and I plummeted straight into a surgical menopause,” she adds.
“It’s been quite hard to determine what’s menopause-related and what’s post-cancer treatment-related. I still ache a lot but I think that’s starting to get a bit better, so I think that is probably more menopause related. I had no idea what a minefield HRT is.”
The support of those closest to Lauren has kept her going. “From a family perspective, everyone just kind of fell into place of what they were naturally good at and what they were put here to do for me,” she says.
© Lauren JollyLauren’s husband Matt accompanied her to every appointment and asked all the questions she had forgotten while taking care of the boys. Lauren’s parents took care of her with her mum driving her to chemo appointments.
“Some days I got in the car and I was happy and smiley. Some days, I got in the car and I cried the whole way to hospital. Other days I was eating salt and vinegar crisps like I was incredibly hungover at 8:00 am because I felt so sick,” she remembers.
Lauren’s brother, work colleagues, and the parents of her children’s friends also rallied around.
The road to recovery
After months of gruelling treatment, Lauren remembers being told she was cancer free while driving to the train station to head to work. “I wasn’t expecting it, it was really weird,” she says. “When I got home that evening, my mum and dad had been with the boys to buy loads of balloons, and had some champagne ready.
“We had a little drink with them and it was really lovely.”
Looking to the future
Nowadays, Lauren sees her gynecologist every three months and her oncologist every six. “Sometimes my body still really frustrates me because it can’t do what I used to,” she says. “[But] I just feel so incredibly grateful, and that sometimes gets me emotionally because if I hadn’t followed my gut, it could be totally different.”
Lauren has also found empowerment through the Lady Garden Foundation. “I love that they are just straight up honest about it and don’t beat around the bush,” she says. “They’re really getting out there and talking. In a way, it gave me more confidence to talk more openly about it.”
© Lauren JollyLauren even used some of their material to do a presentation at work during Cervical Cancer Awareness Month. “I honestly never thought in my role that I would ever say the word ‘vagina’ at work,” Lauren jokes. “They’re really breaking down barriers, and it’s really nice to have an actual gynae cancer charity that is raising awareness of gynae cancers because it just feels so needed.”
