Josh Widdicombe. Victoria Derbyshire

Josh Widdicombe

L ast year, when I was in hospital, the anaesthetist told me that he thought they should legalise heroin. I’d never been under anaesthetic before and I wondered if this was part of the process, like counting to ten until you have passed out. ‘Good news, we know he’s under; he stopped talking around the point he agreed that VAT on drugs could help the NHS.’

I don’t have any strong views on the heroin question, not the kind of views I would share with strangers injecting me with morphine anyway, so I nodded and smiled and tried to move the conversation on to Arsene Wenger, like I do in the back of a taxi. And then passed out.

Support the NHS.

Victoria Derbyshire

I’d just said ‘I love you’ to a Greek radiologist I met only three hours earlier. It wasn’t a date.

Aged forty-six, I had a shock breast cancer diagnosis. It was a profound moment in mine and my family’s life and turned everything upside down. I’d only ever been in hospital to give birth. I didn’t even know my local hospital, Ashford and St Peter’s in Surrey, had a breast care clinic.

Demitrios Tzias was one of a team of NHS specialists treating me. He had a low, reassuring voice (he’d have sounded terrific on the radio) as he explained the ultrasound he was carrying out on my left breast was to check if the cancer had spread. I was having my right breast removed because that definitely was cancerous. My partner Mark and our two boys, aged eight and eleven, were with me for support and they all engaged in football chat – remember when Greece won the Euros? It occurred to me to mention to Demitrios the couple of dizzy spells I’d experienced recently and the room suddenly went silent. He asked the boys to wait outside and Demetrios looked me straight in the eye and calmly said, ‘In that case, I think you should have a full CT scan which will check your body and your brain.’

It took one heartbeat for us to absorb that information. ‘Oh god,’ I said. It was the fact that Demitrios had specifically mentioned the brain.

There was more silence as the significance of what he’d said hung there. Then the questions came: if there was apparently no cancerous tissue in my lymph nodes (which there wasn’t), how was it possible that the cancer could have bypassed them and travelled to my brain? It was possible, he explained; unusual, but possible.

My heart started to crack and I panicked inside. I tried to process what was happening and couldn’t. Mark gently held both my arms and said something reassuring about the odds of it having travelled to my brain being unbelievably low.

Within half an hour, Demitrios had arranged for me to have the scan and I lay on a white bed that rolled back into the CT tube. It was claustrophobic but that was the least of my worries. It took only ten minutes and Demitrios told us before we left that he’d try to let me know that afternoon what the result was.

Driving the short distance home it felt like I was suffocating. We pretended everything was normal to the boys. As soon as we arrived back, they went outside to play football and Mark and I sat opposite each other at the kitchen table. We had to talk about it there and then, there was no tip-toeing around it. I took a deep breath and told Mark calmly he might have to bring up the boys on his own. He immediately said that wasn’t going to happen, it couldn’t happen. He looked forlorn and I didn’t blame him in the slightest, but it was surreal how utterly focused I was on the practicalities – how much equity there was in the house, how it would be possible to pay off the mortgage and downsize if I wasn’t around any more.

Forty-five minutes later, as I lay on my bed staring at the ceiling, my mobile rang. It was Demitrios. Shit, this was it. I could barely breathe. I didn’t speak, simply listened.

He was brief: ‘Hello Miss Derbyshire, I’m ringing to tell you your scan is clear – it has not spread to another part of your body.’

‘Oh my god Demitrios, I LOVE YOU! THANK YOU SO MUCH, thank you, thank you,’ I shouted.

I threw my phone on the bed, raised both my arms in the air, clenched my fists and ran downstairs screaming, ‘It hasn’t spread! He’s just rung me and it hasn’t spread!’

That’s why I love Demitrios – and it’s not just him: I owe my life to compassionate, skilled nurses, doctors, registrars, radiologists, anaesthetists and radiographers from Mumbai, Sydney, Manila, Colombo, Athens, Port of Spain, Scarborough and St Helen’s. The sons and daughters of those towns and cities came to London and worked for the NHS. Over 301 days they cared for, treated and looked after me. And I’m grateful for that every single day.

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