I am grateful to Hilary Osborne for helping me understand why the Princess of Wales’s video made me so anxious (Kate’s recovery is great news, but beware of a soft-focus look at life after chemo, September 11). I was diagnosed with stage 2, grade 2 invasive breast cancer last Christmas, with talks of chemotherapy following the tumor biopsy, until genomic testing gave me a reprieve. So I “got off okay” and need to “look on the bright side,” as some friends clumsily remind me.
There are some silver linings, but all cancer is crap. And even without chemo, I still feel grey. My heart cries for Kate, and I’m a royalist in general. But did her PR team really have to sugarcoat it that much? And now I feel a little worse about myself and my failure to fully thrive after my own rough, but not so rough, year.
Ali Hutchison
Dorchester, Dorset
I completely agree with Hilary Osborne’s article and I am glad Kate has completed her treatment. However, I find the shocking and somewhat self-congratulatory video inappropriate and perhaps even slightly insulting to those who have experienced this journey in real life.
I remember this journey with fear and dread about how the mortgage and bills would be paid, how my heartbroken daughters would cope if I died, and how on earth I would get my life back on track if I was lucky enough to undergo this grueling treatment.
The privilege that emanates from this video made it unrecognizable to mere mortals like me who have had to walk the same (but in so many ways very different) path. I am certainly no royalist, but I also felt that if such a soft-focus, cinematic video had been released by Harry and Meghan, the media reaction would have been very different indeed.
Jane Dove
Isleworth, London
“There is … a childlike frankness in illness,” Virginia Woolf wrote in her essay On Being Ill. Things are said, truths blurted out, that the cautious decency of health masks. Was the short video in which the Princess of Wales wanted to share her illness nothing more than someone with cancer wanting to tell a wider circle than her family and close friends? Perhaps she felt the need to share her feelings with the rest of the world.
Many of us have been in similar situations, but without the constraints of royal life. We wanted to share with others who are willing to listen about the burden of illness. Perhaps Kate, like many others, will look back on this video as a mistake. Many of us have been there and spoken out more than we normally would. Let’s hope that one day she will look back on this video and ask herself why she felt the need to make it.
Julia Clibborn
London
Hilary Osborne’s article spoke to me. The year after finishing chemo and radiation was not good, despite knowing I was cancer-free. Also, it was hard to be more or less hair-free for months while it started to grow back. There was that grayness that Hilary mentions, and there was a sense of anger and invisibility, and there were desperate tears at work.
It took me almost a year after that to feel (meaning “look”) normal again. Good for Kate for doing better. She’s lucky the treatment she had didn’t cause her to lose her hair. But she should know that many others going through chemotherapy aren’t so lucky. Since she chose not to share details about the type of cancer she had, or the type of drugs she was given to treat it (which spared her hair), I don’t think she should share the artificial, gold-filtered view of life after cancer in her video.
Nadia Lawrence
Munich, Germany