"We're going to get you better" - five stories that show the power of radiotherapy - Cancer Research UK

Here in the UK, radiotherapy plays a part in treating more than 140,000 people with cancer every year.*

Some of them are babies just taking their first wobbly steps across the living room. Others, a bit older, are climbing the stairs up to the school bus, or leaping into the next stage of life at work or university.

More are parents helping their children find their way – even if they’re still a little lost themselves. Many more than that are grandparents and great-grandparents, excited to follow their families’ new journeys, and as curious as ever about what’s around the next corner.

Each of these people could have a very different type of cancer from the next.

Last month, we went back through the generations to find out how radiotherapy came to be such an important treatment for so many different people. Now, we’re going to meet some of them.

Laurel’s story: radiotherapy for oesophageal cancer

Laurel’s radiotherapy story began in 2006, with what she thought would be a routine trip to her GP.

She’d booked the appointment because she was starting to find it hard to swallow. Her doctor organised some tests to see exactly what was going on in her food pipe.

The results showed that Laurel had oesophageal cancer.

“I was in shock,” Laurel says. “But my consultant told me: ‘We’re going to get you better.’”

The consultant’s plan involved treating Laurel with chemotherapy and radiotherapy together, an approach we helped pioneer in the 1970s, and one that combines the strengths of both treatments.

A head-and-shoulders image of Laurel smiling in her home. She is dressed in a yellow patterned top and an African-patterned headband. — Laurel in her home.

For her part, Laurel had other people to think about. “The biggest challenge was telling my children,” she says.

There were more to come. In the short term, Laurel’s radiotherapy made her original symptoms worse.

“The next year was tough. I had to be fed through a tube at times because I couldn’t swallow.”

But the treatment shrunk her cancer, until eventually there were no signs left of it at all.

“I’m a different woman since I had cancer,” says Laurel, who was also successfully treated for breast cancer in 2023. “My attitude to life and my thought processes are different, my diet is better, and I look after my health and wellbeing so much more.

“I am forever grateful. I look at my life every morning and I see another day.”

Our work to improve radiotherapy for oesophageal cancer

Everything we eat and drink goes through the oesophagus, the long, thin tube that connects the mouth to the stomach. Treating cancers in this area comes with a risk of difficult side effects because radiotherapy can also damage healthy cells near tumours.

In the 1970s, we ran some of the first clinical trials on combining chemotherapy and radiotherapy to create better treatments. Now we’re testing whether we can make those treatments kinder by using a newer form of radiotherapy called proton beam therapy.

PROTIEUS is the UK’s first ever clinical trial for proton beam therapy, which can focus radiation much more precisely on the area of the tumour. It’s specifically looking at cancers in the oesophagus and its junction with the stomach.

“There is never enough said or done to support the research,” says Laurel. “Cancer Research UK do an amazing job. The positive changes they’re bringing to cancer patients’ lives are mind blowing.”

Jesse’s story: radiotherapy for glioblastoma

Physical changes like Laurel’s difficulty swallowing can be important signs of multiple different types of cancer, but they aren’t the only ones. Certain cancers can cause symptoms that are much harder to comprehend.

While cycling to her local swimming pool in August 2021, 24-year-old Jesse was overtaken by something strange and uncomfortable, like deja vu crossed with a hallucination.

In her mind’s eye, she could see a celebrity she’s never once met stood in her East London kitchen.

Jesse could tell that the vision wasn’t real – but that didn’t stop the foul taste filling her mouth, or the sense of fear that was swallowing her up.

“It was like a flashback to the worst thing that could ever have happened to me, but I knew it hadn’t happened,” says Jesse, now 27.

At first, doctors told Jesse she had experienced some type of seizure. They referred her for brain scans, which showed she had a glioblastoma brain tumour.

A selfie of Jessie in her hospital bed after her brain surgery. . She is smiling and giving a thumbs up to the camera. She is wearing glasses and her head is bandaged. — Jesse after her brain surgery.

The news was so shocking that Jesse says she and her partner, Faith, “burst out laughing” when they heard it.

In November, Jesse had a nine-hour operation to remove the tumour. After that came six weeks of daily radiotherapy and chemotherapy.

This rigorous ‘adjuvant’ (from the Latin for ‘to help’) treatment approach is designed to kill any remaining cancer cells. The radiation is targeted directly at the tumour site, almost like a second phase of the surgery. The chemotherapy works in and around the tumour site, too, but it can also kill any cancer cells that may have spread.

In the last phase of her treatment, Jesse received six cycles of monthly chemotherapy to lower the chances that the cancer might come back.

While that was happening, Jesse went back to work – and she and Faith got married.

She’s had no evidence of cancer ever since.

“I have long outlived even the most generous prognoses for glioblastoma,” Jesse says. “Initially I was scanned every three months, then it was reduced to every four months, and last year it moved to every six months.”

Peter’s story: radiotherapy for prostate cancer

Peter, who created the children’s TV show Tiswas in the 1970s, started fundraising to support our research in 1989. At the time, he didn’t have much personal experience of cancer.

“Initially, the challenge was how do we actually make money, and, dare I say it, making sure we could enjoy ourselves in the process,” he says. “But then, as I grew older, somehow cancer loomed.”

In 2003, Peter lost his mother to lung cancer. Then, in 2009, as he marked two decades as a fundraiser, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer.

That’s when he started contributing to our work in another way, by joining our CHHiP clinical trial.

CHHiP was set up to test whether doctors could effectively halve the number of radiotherapy sessions needed to treat prostate cancer by delivering stronger radiation doses in each one.

Peter and his wide Ali standing smiling in front of some trees. Ali is wearing a black trenchcoat and Peter is wearing a tweed jacket. — Peter with his wife Ali, who helped ensure his prostate cancer was diagnosed early.

“It was comparing 37 days of radiotherapy with either 20 or 19 days,” Peter explains. “I was lucky: I got 19, so I didn’t have to go quite as long as other people did.”

The trial also introduced a new technique to prostate cancer treatment: intensity modulated radiotherapy (IMRT), which Peter received alongside hormone therapy.

IMRT sculpts radiation beams to more closely match the shape of each patient’s tumour. That extra targeting lowers the risk of side effects by protecting more healthy cells surrounding the tumour, although it doesn’t make the minutes before each session any less delicate.

“The biggest problem was that you had to drink three pints of water before treatment,” Peter says. “If it was delayed, you can imagine, with three pints inside you, what you couldn’t resist doing. And if that happened, you had to start all over again.

“But the interesting thing was that we laughed. I knew it was going to work. My wife gave me confidence, and also all the medics involved gave me a huge amount of confidence. This was just something I had to go through; it was going to work, and it did.”

Thanks to CHHiP, early-stage prostate cancer is now treated with 20 days of radiotherapy, rather than 37. What’s more, under Peter’s leadership, his local fundraising committee has now raised more than £1m to support our work.

More work to do

Peter’s wife Ali was a GP. It was her expertise that helped make sure he was diagnosed at an early stage, before his prostate cancer had begun to spread through his body.

Ali was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2015. She died in the autumn of 2020.

“She saved my life,” says Peter. “I wasn’t able to save hers.”

He’s now more committed to fundraising than ever.

“I’m hoping that those who come after me and raise money for cancer research will be able to save the lives of those like my wife in the future.”

David’s story: repeated radiotherapy

David was diagnosed with cancer three times in five years.

First, in 2015, it was lung cancer, which happened to be causing a very unusual symptom: a toothache.

“The problem was actually in my chest,” David says. “There was a tumour pressing on the nerves in my jaw and neck.”

Surgery wasn’t an option because the tumour was so close to David’s oesophagus. That put him in the same position as Laurel. Doctors treated him with chemotherapy and radiotherapy, which caused some debilitating side effects.

But the treatment worked. All signs of cancer disappeared – and so did the toothache.

Everything was normal until 2017, when a new, persistent ache started in David’s head.

David together with his wife Marion sat outside a cafe. Marion is leaning on David's shoulder, and David's head is resting against hers. They're both smiling at the camera. — David with his wife Marion

His doctor referred him for a brain scan, which he had just before setting off on a long drive to London from his local hospital in the Scottish Borders. The results came back quickly.

“The nurse called me within a couple of hours and said I had to stop driving immediately,” David remembers. He had a brain tumour.

“This time I was able to have surgery to remove the tumour, along with follow-up radiotherapy. I had three zaps to the brain within a week, with no side-effects this time.”

David recovered successfully and was once again cancer-free.

Unfortunately, this reprieve was no longer than the last. In 2019, David was diagnosed with prostate cancer. After three months of hormone therapy, he had 20 radiotherapy sessions across four weeks, according to the recommendations of the CHHiP trial that Peter had taken part in.

David hasn’t needed any more cancer treatments since.

“Thanks to all the successful treatments, I’ve been able to enjoy seeing my grandkids grow up,” says David. “That wouldn’t have been possible without research, and it’s why I want to highlight the work Cancer Research UK is doing to find new treatments and cures. Without that, I wouldn’t be telling my story about being a lung cancer, brain tumour and prostate cancer survivor!”  

Sue’s story: radiotherapy for breast cancer

Although radiotherapy can sometimes be used on its own to treat smaller cancers that haven’t started to spread, everyone sharing their story with us here had radiotherapy in combination with drugs or surgery.

As Sue, who was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2008, puts it, radiotherapy is often “a piece of the puzzle” of cancer treatment.

Sue and her husband George dressed in suits. George's jacket has a grey check pattern. Sue is wearing a soft cut blazer in magenta. George has a large white beard and Sue has short purple hair. Both are wearing glasses that match their outfits. — Sue with her husband George.

Sue’s breast cancer was made up of multiple fast-growing tumours. She needed six months of chemotherapy before it was contained enough for surgeons to operate. Even then, they had to remove her entire right breast, as well as the surrounding muscles and lymph nodes.

Next came radiotherapy, to make sure there were no cancer cells left near where her breast used to be.

“It was the accumulation of different treatments that was most difficult,” Sue says. “I was a bit fed up, and the radiotherapy made me even more exhausted, but I never felt that I didn’t want it.

“It damaged my skin where the beams left my body, which led to problems after, but I realised that I could live with any side effects. It was harsh, but it was giving me life.

“Without radiotherapy as one of the pieces of the jigsaw, I wouldn’t have got the full picture – I may not have lived at all.

“I’ve seen three of my four children married thanks to my treatment, and I’ve met five of my grandchildren. It’s bloody wonderful.”

The art of radiotherapy

Sue was an art teacher when she was diagnosed.

“I used to tell the doctors who decided my treatment that they were being creative,” she says.

“I remember my oncologist saying, ‘I’ve never been called creative before’, but they had to put the pieces together to make this picture work.

“They made me a cocktail, and although it was a very aggressive, harsh cocktail, it let me come out the other end. So, it is creativity. Every scientist is being creative.”

That creativity also inspired Sue to make an image of her own.

The idea started when doctors gave her three pinpoint tattoos to help line up their radiotherapy beams correctly for each treatment session.

“They were my first tattoos,” says Sue. “I was like, ‘Oh, I’ve got tattoos – and it didn’t hurt!’ After that, I just went mad.”

Not straight away. Cancer statistics often refer to ‘five-year survival’, so, five years after her treatment finished, Sue started the process of turning her body into her canvas.

“I wanted to celebrate my scars and transform them into something beautiful,” she says. “It would be my way of reclaiming control of my body – I’d be making a statement that cancer doesn’t always have to leave the last mark.”

She chose to cover her chest with a design of lotus flowers and mandala patterns, which she’d fallen in love with while travelling in India.

“Lotus flowers bloom from really muddy, murky water, and they blossom into something beautiful,” she explains. “It was an analogy between the dankness of the water as the cancer and then my life being reclaimed as the beautiful flowers.

“Now, every morning, when I get into the shower and see myself in the bathroom mirror, I don’t see scars. I see this beautiful pattern.”

Sue's tattoo. A symmetrical black ink chest piece stretching up over her shoulders. Lacework connects a series of mandala patterns and lotus flowers.

* Estimated based on Cancer Research UK analysis of England data for 2022/23.

Cancer News

“We’re going to get you better” – five stories that show the power of radiotherapy