Princess Kate: Now close the door, draw the curtains and focus on you!

22 March 2024, 21:09 | Updated: 22 March 2024, 21:10

Firstly, I’d like to wish the Princess of Wales and her family well. This will be a very difficult time and my thoughts are with them all.

Watching The Princess of Wales’ video this evening has hit me hard, as I’m sure it has many people.

Hearing her explain how she’s recently started chemotherapy immediately took me right back to December 2022 when I started my chemotherapy for breast cancer.

At the age of 36, it was the most petrifying time of my life. I couldn’t even think straight, let alone try to make sense of what people around me were thinking or saying.

I can only imagine that this is how she must be feeling now – and to make a speech to the nation when it can feel like the world as you know it is falling apart, is incredible. Cancer and its treatments impact everyone differently, but they are still extremely harsh treatments.

During my surgeries, chemotherapy and radiotherapy, I wanted nothing more than to hibernate, hide away and focus solely on the hell that is cancer – and honestly – I had no energy to do anything else. I am so grateful that I was allowed to do that.

To watch Kate tonight, I think it’s important to realise just how much strength it would have taken to get up, to get dressed, to put make up on and then to speak into a camera to explain a personal medical situation which will, no doubt, be incredibly upsetting to talk about.

All the media training and experience in the world could never prepare you for that.

I do hope that The Princess Of Wales and her family will now be left alone to get through this journey. Cancer of course impacts the person with it, but I know and have watched first-hand how it simply bulldozes through everyone and everything around that person too. There will be highs and lows and the journey can be long and gruelling.

If I have learnt one thing over the last year and a half following my own diagnosis, it is that you never know what someone else is going through. Even if this wasn’t cancer, I do believe that we all have the right to recover in our own time, without constant speculation.

I hope we can be kinder going forward and when someone says they’re not well, that we can take that statement for what it is and give them the space they need to get better, whatever the illness is.

Kate, it’s time to close the door, draw the curtains and focus on you!