Sky News presenter Jacquie Beltrao has revealed she planned her own funeral after being diagnosed with cancer. The 61-year-old was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2013 and underwent a lumpectomy as well as gruelling chemotherapy treatment.
Jacquie was told chemotherapy was optional because her cancer was grade two and unlikely to return, however, she had it anyway. "It was horrible, gruelling chemo, which left me sick and exhausted and my hair thinning, but I did it – and I received the all clear I felt I deserved," she said in a new interview with The Telegraph. She was told her chances of the disease returning within the next five years was just three per cent.
Cancer Returns in 2020
Jacquie learned her cancer had returned in 2020, during the height of the Covid pandemic, and discovered it was more aggressive than ever before. "That lump is cancer. Again. And it's much more aggressive than your first. We need to get on top of this really, really quickly," her breast cancer surgeon told her.
The former Olympic gymnast described her second diagnosis as a "living nightmare", having spent the last seven years restoring her health after beating cancer. In a tragic admission, Jacquie said: "I remember thinking, 'But I've done everything right. I can't believe it has come back to try to kill me again.'"
Jacquie explained that her original breast tumour had grown slow, with a replication rate just 10 per cent. However, her new one had a replication rate of 80 per cent. Rushed to hospital for an MRI scan, the TV presenter discovered she had a mass inside her chest cavity and underwent 17 weekly rounds of paclitaxel chemotherapy.
Treatment and Discovery
Although Jacquie was apprehensive about undergoing chemotherapy after her first diagnosis, she knew she didn't want to delay treatment and proceeded straight away the second time around, determined to face whatever side effects lay ahead. After six weeks of treatment, scans showed the tumour in her chest cavity had shrunk.
Jacquie told the publication: "But before long, I could tell something wasn't right. I had two lymph nodes in my collarbone, which I think of as my little indicators of whether there's something going on, and I could feel them getting bigger. Unfortunately, those growing nodules weren't a false alarm. After 12 rounds of chemo, a second scan revealed my cancer was growing again. So I was pulled off the chemo and put on palbociclib, a treatment for breast cancers like mine, which are oestrogen receptor positive (ER+)."
This brought into focus Jacquie's fear of missing out on her children's futures, as her two sons were just about to head off to university and her daughter had recently graduated. Jacquie and her husband Eduardo share three children, Amelia, 28, Tiago, 26 and Jorge, 25.
A Life-Saving Drug
A few months after she started palbociclib, the nodules in Jacquie's collarbone began to grow, and a full-body CT scan showed that she had tumours in both her thigh bones, and one in the middle of her spine. Jacquie then had a genomic blood test which examines the DNA of the cancer in someone's body. The mum-of-three revealed the genomic test wasn't offered to her through the NHS, and she was only given it because of the health insurance she had through working at Sky.
After examining the DNA of Jacquie's cancer, her doctor prescribed her with olaparib, which ultimately saved her life. Olaparib stops damaged cancer cells from repairing themselves, meaning they eventually weaken and die. Around three weeks later, Jacquie could already feel her lymph nodes shrinking.
Previous check-ups had shown the cancer was all over Jacquie's body, including her arms, legs, and spine, meaning she was stunned when the doctor told her there was no evidence of the disease in June 2021. "For some people, the drug does very little. For some, it works for a couple of years. But, for me, it worked completely. I still take it every day and although it has some side effects that leave me feeling fatigued, it is still keeping my cancer at bay more than five years later," she told the publication.
Jacquie added: "For a long time, I was planning my own funeral, so I know I've been incredibly lucky. Life's never going to be the same as it was before my diagnosis, but I'm still here. And it's all thanks to a drug that wasn't even a treatment for breast cancer when I found that first lump back in 2013."
