Woman says Deborah James’ bowel cancer campaign saved her life

A woman has told how health campaigner Dame Deborah James saved her life from fatal bowel cancer.

Lyndsey Ainscough, from Leigh in Greater Manchester, only decided to seek advice after seeing James on television shortly before her death.

The 40-year-old, who has three children, told PA Media she was diagnosed with stage 3 cancer after suffering symptoms for several months but thought it was irritable bowel syndrome.

She said: “I developed quite a lot of symptoms during the Covid lockdowns and suffered from bleeding, weight loss and fatigue. I had seen that Deborah James was on the news and she was trying to get attention for her story. One day it clicked.

“I remember I was sitting in the kitchen doing the ironing and when she came on the news she said something that caught my attention. And I turned to my husband and said, ‘Those are the symptoms I’m getting, maybe I have colon cancer.’

“He shrugged his shoulders with: ‘Don’t be silly, you’re too young to have colon cancer.’ And from that moment on I actually decided to get checked out.”

James, the headteacher turned podcaster who raised millions of pounds for charity with her campaign to raise awareness of bowel cancer, died in June 2022. She retired from a career as a deputy headteacher and began blogging about her diagnosis in 2017 under the name Bowelbabe. .

She went on to become a Sun columnist and released a book, F*** You Cancer: How to Face the Big C, Live Your Life and Still Be Yourself. She was best known for sharing her six-year battle with terminal bowel cancer on the popular BBC podcast You, Me and the Big C, which she began co-presenting in 2018.

Ainscough, an education manager at secondary school, made an appointment with her GP, who sent her straight for a colonoscopy in June 2022 to examine the lining of her bowel.

“I thought I went because I had IBS or something like that, because I always had bloating,” she said. “I didn’t really think anything of it at the time.

“I didn’t make a big deal about it, my husband was working and I didn’t ask him to come with me or anything like that. I really thought I was going to be diagnosed with IBS.

“My mother took me for the appointment and it was more or less confirmed that it was rectal cancer.

“Dame Deborah helped save my life,” she said.

After receiving her diagnosis, Ainscough went home and told her husband, Christian, the news. The couple decided to tell their eldest child, Alfie, now 12, but felt their other children Perry, now four, and Spencer, now eight, were too young to understand.

“The concerns were enormous, especially because we had such young children,” Ainscough said. “To be honest (Alfie) accepted it quite well at the time, but that was probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.

“And telling my dad was also one of the hardest things to do because my dad wasn’t there and it was completely unexpected. It was horrible to tell him.”

Scans from January last year showed she was completely cancer-free; the immunotherapy in combination with chemotherapy and radiotherapy had eradicated the disease.

James’ mother, Heather, said: “Deborah worked relentlessly to improve the lives of others until the end of her life, so it’s an honor to hear the impact of her work through beautiful stories like Lyndsey’s.”