I’m grateful to Hilary Osborne for helping me understand why the Princess of Wales’s video left me so disquieted (Kate’s recovery is great news – but be wary of a soft-focus view of life after chemo, 11 September). I had stage 2, grade 2 invasive breast cancer last Christmas, with talk of chemotherapy after the tumour biopsy – until genomic testing gave me a reprieve. So I “got off lightly”, and need to “look on the bright side”, as some friends unhelpfully remind me.
There are some silver linings, but all cancer is crap. And even without chemotherapy, I still feel greyed-out. My heart aches for Kate, and broadly speaking I’m a royalist. But did her PR team really have to add so much saccharine? And now I feel just a bit more rubbish about myself and my failure to fully thrive after my own tough, but less tough, year.
Ali Hutchison
Dorchester, Dorset
• I completely agree with Hilary Osborne’s article and also felt that while being pleased that Kate has completed her treatment, the jarring and somewhat smug video was inappropriate, and perhaps even a little insulting to those who have experienced this journey in the real world.
My memories of this journey are of fear and terror of how the mortgage and bills were to be paid, how my deeply distressed daughters would cope if I died, and how on earth I would pick up the pieces of my life if I were fortunate enough to complete this gruelling treatment.
The privilege that oozes from this video made it unrelatable for those ordinary mortals like myself who had to navigate the same (but very different in so many ways) path. I am certainly no royalist, but I also felt that if such a soft-focus cinematic video had been released by Harry and Meghan, the media reaction would have been very different indeed.
Jane Dove
Isleworth, London
• “There is … a childish outspokenness in illness,” wrote Virginia Woolf in her essay On Being Ill. Things are said, truths blurted out, which the cautious respectability of health conceals. Was the short video in which the Princess of Wales wanted to share her illness no more than someone diagnosed with cancer who wanted to tell a wider circle than her family and her close friends? Perhaps she felt a need to share her feelings with the rest of the world.
Many of us have been in similar situations, although without the restraints of royal life. We want to share with others who are happy to listen about the burden of illness. Perhaps later, Kate, as many others, will look back on this video as a mistake. Many of us have been there and spoken more than we normally would. Let us hope that she will one day look back on this video and ask herself why she felt the need to make it.
Juliet Clibborn
London
• Hilary Osborne’s article resonated with me. The year after finishing chemotherapy and radiation was not a good one, despite the knowledge that I was cancer-free. Also, being more or less hair-free for several months while it started growing again was difficult. There was that greyness that Hilary mentions, and there was feeling angry, and invisible, and there were despairing tears at work.
Afterwards, it took nearly a year for me to feel (which means “look”) normal again. Good for Kate that she’s better. She’s lucky that the treatment she had didn’t make her lose her hair. But she must know that many others undergoing chemotherapy aren’t so lucky. Since she’s chosen not to share the details of the type of cancer she had, or the type of drugs she was given to treat it (which spared her hair), in my opinion she probably shouldn’t share the artificial, golden-filtered view of life post-cancer in her video either.
Nadia Lawrence
Munich, Germany
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