Victoria Derbyshire: 'I wrote goodbye letters to my sons - I was worried I wouldn't wake up from breast cancer surgery'

VICTORIA DERBYSHIRE TALKS ABOUT SURVIVING CANCER AND WRITING 'GOODBYE' LETTERS TO HER SONS BEFORE LIFE-SAVING SURGERY

Cancer survivor Victoria joined us to talk candidly about her experience of breast cancer and the emotional moment she decided to write 'goodbye' letters to her sons before having a mastectomy.

Talking about her concerns about having a mastectomy and writing the letters to her two sons, Victoria said, 'It was life-saving surgery. I had a fear about the anaesthetic, rather than getting rid of a breast. That was fine, it had cancer in there, get rid of it. I just worried, what if I don’t wake up?'

'I know that was irrational – that was the anxiety in the run up to the operation. The only way I could get to sleep the night before was to write two letters - one to Oliver who is my oldest son, who was 11 at the time, and one to Joe, who was 8 at the time, just to tell them – I’m going to cry sorry – just to tell them how much I love them and remind them of funny things they’d done throughout their life. Remind them a bit about how they were born – because Oliver took ages to come out, Joe was out in two hours... they love those stories. Just remind them to be polite when they grow up and have manners.'

Having now written a book, Dear Cancer, Love Victoria, about her experience, she said: 'I did some video diaries through my treatment, documenting the side effects. Lots of people watched them. That wasn’t the point of it, it was just because I’m a journalist and I work on TV, I thought, I’ll record what happens. The response to those was overwhelming – [people said] "I watched this before I had a mastectomy and it really helped me". I was not expecting that, I felt really privileged. Then I thought maybe I could write about it, because I do write a diary. Obviously there’s a lot of rubbish in there as well, it just went from there.'

And Victoria revealed cancer has changed her attitude to life, saying, 'I just live my life intensely, intensively, I squeeze the life out of every second of every day.'

This was her reason to take part inITV’s The Real Full Monty: Ladies’ Night with our Coleen Nolan.

'I thought it was mad, I thought it was also a brilliant opportunity to get a message through to millions of women in one fell swoop to check their breasts – that was the whole aim of it and I think we achieved that,' Victoria said. 'Since having cancer, I lived life to the full before, now I really live life to the full. I want to say yes to every opportunity.'

Watch the video above to see the full interview.

Victoria gives her advice to those going through breast cancer treatment in the video below.

We have breast cancer helplines available here.