Strictly Come Dancing professional and fan favourite Amy Dowden has opened up about the heartbreaking news she was given by doctors after she refused chemotherapy at first following her second breast cancer diagnosis.
Back in June, the BBC star had hoped that she would only need radiotherapy and even stood a chance of returning to Strictly this year following her mastectomy.
At that point, three tumours, further cancer “specks” and some lymph nodes from her right breast had been removed.
However, just days afterwards she received the devastating news that doctors had found a second type of breast cancer in the tissue they removed, as well as more tumours and specks in her other breast.
In an interview with the Mirror, Amy recalled the “shock” she felt, as even the doctor wasn’t expecting to find what he did, telling her they would have to consider another mastectomy.
She went on to explain how her first reaction to chemotherapy was to refuse it.
Amy said: “I thought that’s Strictly with a partner wiped out, that’s my hair gone, that’s my life gone. I was like, ‘I don’t want to do that.’
“I was pretty adamant up until the day before, I had a meltdown, a crying fit going ‘I don’t want to do it’.”
However, medics then delivered the tragic news that she would be reducing her survival chances if she refused, with the surgeon telling Amy: “You can dance forever and ever afterwards.”
It wasn’t until she spoke to her former dance teacher in Wales that Amy fully realised what she would be giving up.
The dancer remembered: “She gave me tough love and said, ‘What’s the point of these embryos if you’re not going to have chemo? Because you won’t be around to have these babies anyway’.”
Amy, who had been undergoing IVF to create and freeze embryos before starting treatment, knew deep down that chemotherapy was the right option.
On her hopes of returning to Strictly, she added: “I dream every night of being back on the dance floor, but I don’t want to set myself up for disappointment.”
Strictly Come Dancing continues this Saturday at 6.20pm on BBC One and BBC iPlayer.
