LONDON (The Thursday Times) — The mathematician and broadcaster Hannah Fry has said she feels “unbelievably lucky” after being treated for cervical cancer six years ago, and that she recently received her five-year all-clear.
Fry, 42, a professor at the University of Cambridge who recently took part in the second series of Celebrity Traitors, spoke about her treatment to Lauren Laverne on the radio programme Desert Island Discs. She said cancerous cells were found after she attended a cervical screening in 2020, having put off the appointment for months. The results took a few weeks, then her GP called her back for another test and a biopsy. She went on to have a hysterectomy, which she described as “horrific”.
Waiting on the lymph nodes
Fry said her chances of survival depended on whether the cancer had reached her lymph nodes. If it had not, the odds were in her favour. If it was in one node, she said, survival would drop to 60 per cent, and with two it would fall to 40 per cent. While in isolation in hospital after the operation, a surgeon told her that four of her lymph nodes had appeared enlarged.
She said she was alone in the hospital bed and nobody could visit her for more than a week. She asked her then husband to set up FaceTime in the corner of a room so she could watch her two young daughters play. “I didn’t want them to see me, it was too much,” she said.
Fry said that however awful the treatment was, it had an end point, and that she feels very lucky after her five-year check. Despite everything, she said she would not swap the experience.
Fry grew up in a working-class family and studied mathematics at University College London. She completed a PhD in fluid dynamics and last year became Cambridge’s first professor of the public understanding of mathematics. She has fronted science series including The Secret Genius of Modern Life.
