Jeni-the-Dragon

She was told she was dying, and she went home to spend her last weeks with her family. Before she did, she asked the country for one last favour. In under 48 hours, it gave her more than three million pounds. She was a deputy head teacher from Surrey. As a girl she had been a serious gymnast, training 30 hours a week by the age of nine. She studied economics at the University of Exeter. She married in 2008 and had two children. She taught computer science at schools in Chertsey and Staines. Then, in 2016, at the age of 35, she was diagnosed with incurable bowel cancer. Her name was Deborah James. Most people would have retreated into private grief. Deborah did the opposite. She started writing about it for The Sun, in detail, with no shame and no filter. She talked about the symptoms people are embarrassed to mention. She talked about blood, and bowels, and fear. She did it on purpose. Bowel cancer kills thousands of people in Britain every year, and she wanted nobody to be too embarrassed to see a doctor in time. In March 2018, she began presenting a BBC Radio 5 Live podcast called You, Me and the Big C, alongside two other women living with cancer, Lauren Mahon and Rachael Bland. Rachael died that September. Deborah kept going. The Guardian called the podcast unique for its "frankness, honesty and humour", and called Deborah "its outrageous heart". In October 2018, she published a book with a title that left nobody in doubt about how she felt about the disease. She became known to the whole country by her online name. Bowelbabe. Ask yourself how many conversations she started. How many people, reading her columns or listening in the car, finally booked that appointment they had been putting off. For five years, she lived with a disease she was told she would not survive. In June 2021, she said her cancer was moving in "the wrong direction". The drugs she relied on were no longer working. In May 2022, she posted an update. She was receiving hospice care at home. Her body, she said, just couldn't continue anymore. In that same message, she launched one final campaign. The Bowelbabe Fund, to pay for clinical trials and research into personalised medicine for cancer patients, and to support campaigns raising awareness of bowel cancer. In less than 48 hours, more than £3 million had been given. Two days later, she was made a Dame, for services to charity and cancer awareness. Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge, came to her parents' home in Woking to present the honour to her in person. Deborah James had spent her last strength not on herself, but on the next person who would hear the word cancer. On 28 June 2022, Dame Deborah James died at her parents' house in Woking. She was 40 years old. By the time she died, her fund had raised nearly £7 million. Her final message to the public was quoted across Britain. "Find a life worth enjoying; take risks; love deeply; have no regrets; and always, always have rebellious hope. And finally, check your poo, it could just save your life." Even at the end, she made people smile while telling them the most important thing she knew. She could have spent her last years hiding from the disease. Instead, she gave them away, one honest conversation at a time, so that other people might catch it sooner, and live longer.