The Celebrity Traitors star feared her life was about to end
Hannah Fry has spoken of her terror at facing the “sheer terrifying drop of the end of my existence” following her cervical cancer diagnosis.
The mathematician and broadcaster, 42, recently took part in the second series of The Celebrity Traitors, but was voted out after being unmasked as a Traitor in the fourth episode. She has now opened up about receiving her cervical cancer diagnosis six years ago. In 2020, Fry put off a cervical screening examination for several months, but once she finally attended, was informed that cancerous cells had been found.
Appearing on Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4, she told host Lauren Laverne: “The results didn’t come back for a few weeks and then I got a call from my GP telling me they needed me to come back and do another test and they did a biopsy. I was trying hard not to panic but when they found it was in the lymphatic system… that was when it really started to come down.”
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Although it remained unclear “how bad it was at that point”, Fry was advised that her survival prospects hinged on whether the cells had spread to her lymph nodes.
“It’s all about basically how far into your lymphatic system has it got. If it had not got into any lymph nodes, then the odds were in my favour and I had a really good chance of survival,” she said. “But if it was in one it would drop to a 60% chance of survival and two – the odds would go against me and it would be a 40% chance of survival. Any more and you are really seriously in trouble.”
Following a hysterectomy, Fry was isolating in hospital when she asked her surgeon how her lymph nodes had looked during the operation. She said: “He said four of them were enlarged…like it’s not good news really.
“I was in this hospital bed on my own and no-one could come and visit me for over a week with nothing but the sheer terrifying drop of the end of my existence in front of me – it was horrific.”
Holding back tears, Fry continued: “I think the problem is that when you are in that situation your mind doesn’t really have anywhere to go. You can’t think back to happy things that have already things that have already happened because it is sad and you can’t look forward to things you are hopeful about because it doesn’t feel like it is there.
“And you can’t be there in the moment because it is too painful – you have tubes everywhere and it’s painful because you are stuck on a bed. It’s awful.”
Fry explained that she couldn’t ring family and friends as she was “too sad”, revealing that she asked her husband to position FaceTime in the corner of a room like she was “CCTV” so she could watch their two young daughters play. “I didn’t want them to see me, it was too much,” she said.
Nevertheless, Fry described how “lucky” she felt. “My goodness me, as awful as that was, it had a full stop at the end of the sentence,” she said. “That is an experience that happened in the past. I managed to get through it. I had my five-year clear the other day. I feel so unbelievably lucky.
“Going through something like that I don’t think I would swap it. I think it was honestly such a gift to have that experience when you’re 36 and then come out the other side of it.”
She went on to say: “Every now and then I think about the lessons that I learnt. They are fading a little bit but I want to hold onto them for as long as I can.” Fry is the first Professor of the Public Understanding of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, and is a fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge.
Previously serving as president of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, she also held a professorship in the mathematics of cities at University College London. She has fronted numerous television and radio programmes for the BBC, among them The Secret Genius Of Modern Life.
Desert Island Discs is available on BBC Radio 4 and Sounds from 10am on Sunday.
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