I never knew my cancer could be so ‘sexy’ – but that's what the tabloids turned it into

I made my story public because I wanted to highlight the reality of surviving ovarian cancer. Instead the tabloids focused on the ‘steamy session’ that led to it being discovered

The article that appeared in The Metro sexualising my cancer

“Sex saved my life, tumour victim claims” is not exactly how I imagined my terrifying experience of being diagnosed with cancer at 25 would be explained. But that’s how the media sold it: focusing on sex and my appearance instead of the illness I survived.

I made my story public because I wanted to highlight that ovarian cancer can occur in women under 50 (post menopausal women are the demographic most at risk). I hoped my experience would encourage young women to be firm with their doctors and insist on a second opinion when they felt it necessary. Because, ultimately, my story would be very different had I not been proactive and persistent throughout my diagnosis.

But instead of mentioning any of this, the papers focused almost entirely on two things. Firstly, the minor and relatively inconsequential sexual element of the story; it was after having sex that I first felt an odd twinge in my abdomen that encouraged me to go to my GP (incidentally he brushed my symptoms off as constipation and sent me away). And secondly, my appearance. Quite what my being “stunning” has to do with my contracting and surviving cancer I’m not sure. If they’d been covering the story of a 25-year-old male with cancer their language and tone would have been completely different, there certainly wouldn’t have been as much – or perhaps any – emphasis on his appearance.

Perhaps naively I was very honest in my interview; telling the journalist that it was after a ‘steamy session’ (The Metro’s choice of words) with my boyfriend that I felt a strange sensation and detected an odd mass. I hadn’t expected this minor detail to be the one thing they clung to, so trivial as it was to the wider context of my illness.

Lost within this sexy subplot was the real horror of my experience, the agony of multiple surgeries, of trying to negotiate hospital appointments with study time and being unable to walk without searing abdominal pain for a week after surgery. In The Metro’s rendition my cancer was reduced to a “tumour", which by definition can be either benign or malignant. No matter that this was the latter, life threatening kind; all they cared about was the fortuitous sex and by extension the heroic boyfriend that saved my life.

Even papers that did mention the symptoms to look out for felt it necessary to sexually objectify me, using lewd and sensationalist headlines to lure the reader in before brushing over actual facts at the tail end of their articles. The way the story was portrayed reduced me - like it has many other women - to an insentient vessel used to propagate the papers’ sexist rhetoric. My opinions and story were manipulated so the end result was so far removed from reality that any initial input I had was essentially obsolete.

Sadly this salacious rendition of my tale proved the most conducive to securing column inches. As well as being published in various UK papers, it has been translated and published in nearly 50 countries worldwide.

What was it about my story that aroused so much interest? It saddens me to say it was probably to do with the fact that I’m a tabloid paper’s dream subject: slim, white, young and female. So I guess the old adage is true: sex really does sell. I just never knew cancer could be so seedy.