With flowing chestnut hair and wide blue-violet eyes, she gazes unflinchingly from posters and magazines – alongside the simple, arresting statement: ‘I was terrified, all I heard was cancer, but thanks to Teenage Cancer Trust I knew I was going to be OK.’ I’d glanced at the picture a number of times, simply assuming she was a pretty girl, hired to be the face of a very worthy cause.
Certainly, her fresh-faced beauty – and youth – are not what you associate with cancer. But if you look closely, Charlotte Newman is wearing a wig. And if there seems to be a care-worn knowing in her stare, it is perhaps because, indeed, she did face cancer. And she survived against unfavourable odds. The photo was taken five months ago, exactly a year after the 23-year-old from Leeds had been given the tentative all-clear. Her hair, lost through chemotherapy, hadn’t yet grown back. The charity approached Charlotte to front their campaign after reading her story on the Just Giving page of her father Dominic and sister Emma, who ran this year’s London Marathon for the charity. A video of her story was broadcast to 5,000 people every night over a week for the Teenage Cancer Trust (TCT) concerts at the Royal Albert Hall in March and Charlotte appeared on stage with Noel Gallagher.
Today, she is telling her story for the first time – and although her hair has now finally grown back to shoulder length (it looks longer thanks to a hairpiece), the trauma of the past few years is still vivid.
She had been suffering with stomach ache for months, with the pains becoming more frequent and more painful as time went on. At first Charlotte dismissed it: ‘But then I started to get really bloated – my tummy felt rock-hard it was so swollen. And I could feel a lump in my lower abdomen.’ After several visits to her GP, she was referred to a gynaecologist who sent her for an urgent MRI scan, followed by a biopsy. She was diagnosed with Ewing’s Sarcoma, a cancer that is most prevalent in teenagers and one of the most aggressive and hard to treat. Although it is typically a bone cancer, Charlotte’s was in the soft tissue between her womb, bowel and bladder.
Charlotte’s despair was short-lived, however. Ten days later she faced her consultant with pen and paper and armed with a list of questions – how many young people were diagnosed with her kind of cancer, the survival rates, what the treatment would be and what the side effects were.
Just 88 young people a year aged 15 to 24 are diagnosed with cancers like Charlotte’s. Roughly half of the boys, and almost two-thirds of girls, survive for more than five years. The hospital became a home from home during her year-long course of treatment. Six cycles of chemotherapy to shrink the tumour were followed by surgery to remove it.
She then needed two more rounds of chemotherapy to make sure it was completely eradicated, followed by a stem-cell transplant to help her cope with the rigours of the gruelling treatment, during which she was kept in isolation for a month. There was a final six-week course of radiotherapy for good measure.
Yet Charlotte’s memories of hospital are far from bleak. ‘It didn’t have the same atmosphere as a conventional hospital ward. I immediately thought, “This is a safe place,” ’ she says. But Charlotte likens the ward to a youth club. ‘The doctors and nurses make you feel normal.
‘I decided I had to power through it. Physically it was awful and debilitating. I was so weak and I lost 20lb in the first week alone.’ A side effect of the treatment was mucositis – painful ulceration of the mouth and digestive tract. Charlotte says: ‘Your mouth burns with ulcers all the way down your oesophagus. I couldn’t eat and could barely swallow or talk.
‘You regress to being an infant again. My mum did everything for me. You can’t dress yourself, feed yourself. I depended on her a lot. I shut off to the world and just had to focus on getting better. ‘Everyone on the ward is a teenage cancer specialist.
‘They’re so well trained that they know how to spot the signs of everything like strange side effects from the treatments or when you’re having a bad day, but they also know how to have a laugh with you. I met so many lovely people on the ward – I wouldn’t change the experience. Charlotte describes herself as ‘a girlie girl’, and losing the long glossy hair she prided herself on was traumatic.
TCT volunteers brought wigs and make-up artists to the ward, who showed the patients how to draw on eyebrows after they fell out. Leeds University kept Charlotte’s place open for her to complete her final year. Having just sat her final law exam, she is now applying for training contracts and in the meantime looking forward to work experience for a local law firm. Charlotte still returns to hospital every two months for scans and blood tests and will continue to do so until five years have elapsed. ‘It doesn’t get easier. In one sense it’s like judgment day every two months, but I accept it as part of my routine now.
‘I love to go back to the ward. I’ve blocked out the bad memories and think of it as a happy time. The Teenage Cancer Trust gave me a reason to smile when I thought all I could do was sit and cry.’