Making Sense of Cancer with Prof Hannah Fry

Thursday: Making Sense of Cancer with Hannah Fry - (BBC Two, 9pm)
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As Britain was entering its first national lockdown in March 2020, Professor Hannah Fry received a letter from the NHS, calling her in for a routine three-yearly smear test.

However, due to her work commitments at University College London, and her roles as author, TV presenter, wife and mum, Hannah missed the test.

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However, in truth, it wasn’t only her busy schedule that made her ignore the screening letter.

“The letter just sat on my desk for a while,” she says. “I think it was partly that we were in lockdown and it was quite difficult to get to the doctors… I think, really, I just didn’t try very hard.”

Unfortunately, Hannah was later diagnosed with stage three cervical cancer. The tumour in her cervix was the size of a gobstopper and, most serious of all, there were multiple enlarged pelvic lymph nodes suggesting it may already be galloping through the rest of her body. In short, she was told that she needed radical surgery to save her life.

As a way of coping with the news, she decided to document her experience from the run-up to the treatment and throughout her recovery. This moving documentary follows the now 38-year-old married mother-of-two and her family through the process, as she’s eventually told the procedure – a radical hysterectomy, which along with the removal of her uterus, included her fallopian tubes, her cervix, part of her vagina and a large selection of pelvic lymph nodes – has been a success.

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However, despite the positive outcome, the radically invasive operation she undergoes changes her life forever. Since going under the knife, Hannah has struggled with the realisation that the cancer had never actually spread as far as oncologists feared. No one knew it at the time, but the odds of her dying were much smaller than was feared.

Now she wants to use her insight and skills as a mathematician – analysing numbers and data, hopefully unhindered by emotion – to interrogate the assumptions and the calculations we make about how to treat cancer.

In the last 40 years, cancer survival rates in the UK have doubled, and 50 per cent of people diagnosed now survive 10 years or more due to surgeries and treatments. Thousands of lives are saved every year by screening programmes and by early interventions.

However, it is also a world in which, as Fry discovers wearing her mathematician’s hat, treatments such as chemotherapy help only a statistically small number of patients, five out of 100 women in the case of breast cancer.

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Eighty of the 100 women would live for 10 years without it. But all 100 women have it to ensure they might be helped by it.

“From the moment I was diagnosed, I’ve become obsessed with the data and statistics behind cancer, and it’s made me question all my assumptions about this disease,” she says. “Through this documentary, I want to explore whether we – patients and specialists – are making the right choices in how we deal with cancer. Have we become so afraid of it, that we’ll do anything to fight it, no matter what the cost? And when we’re deciding whether to go ahead with terrible, life-changing treatments, how do we trade-off between the quantity of life, and its quality?”

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