Television presenter Julia Bradbury has bravely opened up about her gruelling cancer treatment and how she felt knowing that her life – and her body – would never be the same again.
Most known for leading BBC One’s Countryfile and a wide range of ITV travel series, Julia filmed video diaries throughout her cancer treatments to offer other women a useful insight into what treatment is really like.
She has now spoken about how difficult and distressing her treatments were at times.
Julia’s cancer journey began when she found a lump in her breast two years ago. After going for a mammogram, doctors advised that she had a series of harmless micro-cysts in her breast and she was advised to return for another mammogram a year later.
Her second mammogram, in July 2021, found the same result, but with the lump in her breast becoming more and more sore and tender, Julia was sent for an ultrasound.
“I was chatting to the consultant – we were talking about summer holidays – and suddenly he paused and exhaled, and in that second I knew,” Julia told You magazine. “It was this tiny, dark pinprick on the screen, that’s all. But it was enough. Your world just falls away.”
Julia’s biopsy confirmed what had been shown in the ultrasound and she was soon advised that it was a “high grade, sizeable tumour” that could prove difficult to treat.
“The reality is, when you hear the words: ‘you’ve got cancer,’ you think you are going to die,” she told the mag.
And it soon became clear that to save her life, Julia needed to have a breast removed.
She was full of questions: what would it be like to have a mastectomy? How does reconstruction surgery work? And soon realised how many other women facing cancer treatment would have similar questions.
So she bravely decided to use her phone and social media to connect with other women and, with the help of a TV executive friend, she made a documentary to chronicle her journey from diagnosis to surgery and recovery.
To prepare for the operation, doctors marked Julia’s breast with dots and dashes with a black felt tip pen, marking where her breast would have to be cut. Julia says this made her feel like a piece of ‘butcher’s meat’ and that it made her feel lost, out-of-place and out of control – and highly aware that her body would never be the same again.
It wasn’t until two months after her op that Julia felt finally able to look at her left breast in the mirror. She said she didn’t want to look at it when it was bruised, so avoided it completely until her mum eventually persuaded her to take a look – on camera for her documentary – to help her come to terms with the treatment she’d had.
Sadly, Julia still does not have the all-clear. Medics have told her she has “micro-invasions,” small fragments of cancerous cells in her milk duct and breast tissue. Plus, genetic testing has revealed she has a higher than average risk of the cancer returning.
But she’s grateful that doctors have not found a huge spread of aggressive cancer and whilst she has lost a breast, she was able to keep her nipple and didn’t requite a double mastectomy, or rounds of chemotherapy, as some brave women endure.
She is working on getting herself as fit and active as she was pre-treatment and hopes to be able to hold a handstand by the end of the year. Plus, she’s no longer shying away from her breast and has shown her children it, so they can understand the treatment she’s undergone too.
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