Professor Hannah Fry has described fearing the “sheer terrifying drop of the end of my existence” after being diagnosed with cervical cancer in 2020.
The mathematician and broadcaster, 42, recently appeared on the second season of The Celebrity Traitors, where she was banished after being exposed as a Traitor in the fourth episode.
Diagnosis and survival odds
Fry delayed a cervical screening exam for months in 2020, but once she eventually completed it, she was told cancerous cells had been discovered.
Speaking on Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4, she told host Lauren Laverne: “The results didn’t come back for a few weeks and then I got a call from my GP telling me they needed me to come back and do another test and they did a biopsy.”
“I was trying hard not to panic but when they found it was in the lymphatic system… that was when it really started to come down,” she added.
Although it was not clear “how bad it was at that point”, Fry was told her chances of survival depended on whether the cells had spread to her lymph nodes.
Hospital isolation and recovery
“It’s all about basically how far into your lymphatic system has it got. If it had not got into any lymph nodes, then the odds were in my favour and I had a really good chance of survival,” she said.
“But if it was in one it would drop to a 60% chance of survival and two – the odds would go against me and it would be a 40% chance of survival. Any more and you are really seriously in trouble.”
After having a hysterectomy, Fry was in isolation in hospital when she asked her surgeon how her lymph nodes had appeared during surgery. She said: “He said four of them were enlarged…like it’s not good news really.”
“I was in this hospital bed on my own and no-one could come and visit me for over a week with nothing but the sheer terrifying drop of the end of my existence in front of me – it was horrific,” she said.
Reflecting on the experience
Holding back tears, Fry continued: “I think the problem is that when you are in that situation your mind doesn’t really have anywhere to go.”
“You can’t think back to happy things that have already happened because it is sad and you can’t look forward to things you are hopeful about because it doesn’t feel like it is there,” she added.
Fry said she could not call family and friends as she was “too sad”, and asked her husband to set up FaceTime in the corner of a room like she was “CCTV” so she could watch their two young daughters play. “I didn’t want them to see me, it was too much,” she said.
She added how “lucky” she felt: “My goodness me, as awful as that was, it had a full stop at the end of the sentence.”
“That is an experience that happened in the past. I managed to get through it. I had my five-year clear the other day. I feel so unbelievably lucky,” she said.
“Going through something like that I don’t think I would swap it. I think it was honestly such a gift to have that experience when you’re 36 and then come out the other side of it.”
Fry is the first Professor of the Public Understanding of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge. She was previously president of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications and was a professor of the mathematics of cities at University College London.
She has presented several television and radio programmes for the BBC, including The Secret Genius Of Modern Life. Desert Island Discs can be heard on BBC Radio 4 and Sounds from 10am on Sunday.
