As I lay on the bed in the clinic, I felt relaxed and calm. It was June 2023, and I was in my one of my favourite locations, Palazzo Fiuggi – an exclusive and beautiful art deco hotel with a spa and medical wellness centre set in the wooded hills outside Rome.
After years of dieting and exercising, I was the fittest I’d ever been. I’d swapped cocktails for juice fasts, my skin glowed and I looked younger than I did ten years before.
I was a mother to two gorgeous children aged 32 and 22, and was also enjoying great career success as a former CEO and now investor and non-executive director of many leading beauty brands, such as Dr Paw Paw, Murdock London and Trevor Sorbie.
I felt at the top of my game, fully in control – and yet my life was about to be upended in ways I could scarcely have imagined. And it all began with that day at the spa.
Life had not always been easy for me. I grew up in poverty, and I was illiterate until I was 15. My memories of that time are of survival – and of desperately wanting to escape. My mother used to take me shoplifting in big stores, and I would gaze at the beauty-counter women in awe. They seemed to be having such fun and they looked great. I realised that the only way to find a new path in life was to get a job and a flat.
By my mid-30s, I’d overcome many of the issues I faced as a child – but one thing I hadn’t taken control of was my health, writes Tracey
And I did. From my first job unpacking boxes in a chemist, I became a Clinique beauty-counter girl, working my way up until I became director of sales at Aveda and ran the Urban Spa Retreat at Harrods and Harvey Nichols.
By my mid-30s, I’d overcome many of the issues I faced as a child – but one thing I hadn’t taken control of was my health.
Growing up, I’d feared never having enough to eat so, as an adult, food became my comfort. I didn’t sleep well and eased my stresses – work and divorce – with salty snacks.
By the time I was in my mid-40s, I was a size 18 and weighed 130 kilos (more than 20 stone) at 5ft 7in. I had high blood pressure, high blood sugar, blotchy skin and thin hair.
It was my mother’s death from cancer, when she was 65 and I was 47, that changed me. By the time she was diagnosed, it had metastasised to 11 places, and there was no hope. I had to watch her die and it was devastating.
Indeed, every female member of my family, from my great-grandmother to my mother had died young from gynaecological cancers of one kind or another. She was the first to make it past 50, and I knew that if I didn’t sort out my health, I would be next. I didn’t want to die young.
I started going to health retreats. Fasting clinics replaced all-you-can-eat buffets. I worked with a nutritionist and started lifting weights, and I went on a hike through Vietnam.
The pounds dropped off – I lost almost half my body weight – and I reversed my type 2 diabetes. Then, when I was 57, I got a call from Palazzo Fiuggi, a hotel I had been holidaying at for 20 years, telling me they’d reopened as a wellness clinic.
They invited me back to experience their new offerings, and I was excited to return.
As part of my package of treatments, the clinic booked me in for a full body ultrasound, using their newly installed state-of-the art machine. I had no qualms about it. In retrospect, I felt a little tired, yet I had no concrete symptoms, no reason to think there was anything seriously wrong. But as the radiographer moved the probe over my midriff, she paused for a moment. Then she called in the doctor.
‘There’s a lesion there, on your uterus, that looks like a pocket of blood,’ she said. ‘It’s quite big. It could be a cyst, it could be anything, but promise me that when you get home you’ll go to see a gynaecologist.’
Palazzo Fiuggi, a hotel I had been holidaying at for 20 years, invited me back to experience their new offerings, and I was excited to return
Weirdly, although it was a horrible shock, I didn’t feel scared in that moment.
I felt oddly calm – perhaps my childhood experiences had made me mentally strong.
As chance would have it, I was booked in for a smear test the day after I returned home to London, so I decided to stay at the hotel for the remaining three days of my holiday, enjoying the healing waters, which people had been using to boost their health since Roman times.
My smear test revealed abnormal cells. I told the doctor what had happened at the spa, and about my family history, and was put on a fast track. During those six weeks, I decided to distract myself by getting fitter and stronger and healthier.
Was I burying my head in the sand? Perhaps inevitably given my family history, subsequent tests – an internal ultrasound, biopsy and MRI – showed cancer in both my cervix and my womb. In October, I was booked in for surgery: a radical hysterectomy and the removal of lymph nodes to see if the cancer had spread.
And that’s when I started to feel properly scared, to think I might die, to remember what it was like to watch my mother suffer.
The consultant wanted to do the surgery as soon as possible, between the birthdays of my daughter Ava and son Josh, but I refused, saying if anything were to happen to me on the operating table, I didn’t want it to ruin my children’s birthdays for ever.
They agreed to delay it by a few weeks, and when I finally had the op, I was in surgery for six hours – far longer than anticipated.
As part of my package of treatments, the Italian clinic booked me in for a full body ultrasound, using their newly installed state-of-the-art machine
I was told by the professionals at the clinic: ‘It could be anything, but promise that when you get home you’ll go to see a gynaecologist’
It was difficult for the doctors to remove everything because it was entwined in layers of visceral fat, the legacy of years of unhealthy living. What was supposed to be a two-night stay ended up being a ten-night one.
Stage one cancer was found in my cervix and womb, but thankfully it wasn’t in my lymph nodes nor in any of the lesions they removed from my bowel, so I didn’t need chemotherapy or radiotherapy. I firmly believe that if I hadn’t lost all the weight and got fitter, the story would have been very different.
And if I hadn’t gone for that ultrasound at the spa that summer, it might not have been detected at all – or not until it was too late. I could so easily have missed the smear test and been too busy to rebook it.
Women are forever deprioritising their health because life is too hectic, and I certainly had form on that front.
Through a mixture of personal effort and luck, I’d managed to defuse a ticking timebomb.
But I know that cancer can come back. When I recovered from my operation, I booked myself into the Buchinger Wilhelmi clinic in Germany, the oldest therapeutic fasting clinic in the world, and also returned to Palazzo Fiuggi, where I now go twice a year. I stopped drinking alcohol – before I’d have the odd glass of champagne or red wine – and I gave up all sugar.
Eighteen months on, I am cancer-free. I’m currently being monitored every four months, which will reduce to six months in October.
Now 59, my goal is to get to 70. I have a whole food diet, try to eat ten portions of fruit and veg a day, don’t drink fizzy drinks and make sure I sleep eight hours a night. I also walk a minimum of 30 miles a week, and lift weights. I do allow myself the odd croissant, but only as a treat.
What I hope for most is that my story will inspire other people to transform their lives.
Experience has shown me that there are two ways to change things: desperation and inspiration. I have used both – and I promise you that inspiration is better.
*As told to Hilary Freeman