Bryony Gordon: ‘My friend Deborah James’

The first time I met Deb, we were both standing on the set of a studio in east London in nothing more than our underwear. It was early 2019 and we’d followed each other on Instagram for a while - we also had a dear friend in common - and I had asked her if she fancied running 10k in her pants to show that exercise was for everyone, people living with cancer included.  She said ‘of course!’, because Deb is the kind of woman who says ‘of course!’ to everything, from running in her pants to dressing as a giant poo emoji so that people are aware of the signs of bowel cancer.

Anyway, Deb and I became friends. You can’t not become friends with Deb, because she has this energy that makes you feel hope and possibility and above all joy. You’ll note I’m writing about her in the present tense, and this is because I am still refusing to believe she has gone. I might be in this stage forever. The only thing I know for sure is that Deb will live on far longer than most of us still breathing today, in her spirit and in her legacy and all those other cliches that I couldn’t care less are cliches because writing about Deb and what she meant to her friends is more important to me than caring about cliche.

When you were around Deb, you lived a bit more bravely. You witnessed the power of the rebellious hope she has spoken about so movingly in her final interviews and social media posts – something she spoke of often after being diagnosed in December 2016 and transforming herself from a deputy head teacher to a cancer activist, podcaster and tireless campaigner. I remember going to have afternoon tea with her at a posh hotel in central London. She arrived fresh from the hospital, with the results of her most recent scan. Her cancer was stable – no new tumours! – and in that moment, anything was possible. Anything at all.

And with Debs, it was. Life came hard at her, but Deb understood the assignment. She made things happen. Her answer to anything - from an invitation to the opera to the chance to talk about her cancer at a local community hall - was the same: yes. Of course! She would jump at the chance to do a triathlon, or bugger off to the south of France for an impromptu long weekend with her beloved children, Eloise and Hugo. Physical exercise was a particular love of hers. Our friendship was mostly run-based. We would head off on epic trails from my house to hers.  One day, we went out and ran 13 miles along the Thames path, and she had to drag me for most of it. We were both training for the 2020 London marathon, you see. When Covid turned up, I used it as an excuse to opt out, but not Deb. Of course not. Deb still did the marathon that year, virtually. She got up and ran in the freezing wind and rain - 26.2 miles, starting at the steps of the Marsden, and finishing there some five hours later.

She ran with Emma Campbell. Emma has had breast cancer for over a decade, and she says it wasn’t until she met Deb that she learnt she could live positively with the disease. “I always had this notion that I was facing this inevitable decline,” says Campbell. “She allowed me to see that I could live with cancer and that I could also have fun and joy in my life. She was part of my mind shift over cancer.”

The two often had chemotherapy at the same time, and Deb would insist that they danced around with their chemo pumps. “I would think ‘look at this person, look how she’s showing up. Maybe I can show up too’. I think she has given so many of us a sense of hope and possibility, a knowledge that options are all you need.” Deb pushed hard to be allowed on drug trials, to get approval for new treatment. The answer from her oncologists was always: yes! Of course!

“When Deb asked you to do something, you just did it,” says Steve Bland, whose wife, Rachael, died of breast cancer in 2018. It was Rachael’s idea to create the You, Me and the Big C podcast that Deb would come to co-present, and Steve remembers the amazing energy and excitement when Deb, Rachael and co-host Lauren Mahon first sat down to record an episode together. “There was nothing like it out there. There weren’t girls with cancer with hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers, showing people what was possible. Cancer was grey, it was frightening, and of course it is that. But Rachael, Deb and Lauren wanted to create a community, and it’s there now.”

Steve says there are a lot of people who claim to be influencers. “Deb is an influencer in the best possible way. There are literally hundreds of people out there right now, alive, who wouldn’t be if Deb didn’t keep banging the drum for bowel cancer sufferers. Again and again, she would talk about the signs, the blood in the poo. This isn’t just an indirect thing, people are directly alive because of Deborah James, and because she pushed for drugs to be approved.”

We talk a bit more about Deb. As Steve says, he could talk for hours about her. “There is BowelBabe [her social media handle] and there is Deb and they are quite separate, actually,” Steve continues. “Bowel Babe is the show and Deb is the one who is on the phone as soon as she’s heard you are going through a tough time. She wants to help everybody.”

The last time I saw Deb was a couple of days before her 40th birthday, last October. It was a milestone she never expected to see. I went round one morning for a few hours, ostensibly to interview her about the Covid cancer backlog. But it soon turned into a catch up and a natter, as time with Deb inevitably did. It was typical of her that despite the gruelling chemo she was having, and some pretty serious issues with her liver, she still welcomed me into the house in a glamorous frock with a glorious smile on her beautiful face. Deb didn’t want people to see her looking ill - she did not want that to be anyone’s memory of her, least of all her children. We took a selfie together in the garden, and she looks so well, so beaming with life. This is how I will always think of Deb.

She had rotten luck, and yet she’d tell you the opposite, because when she was diagnosed with bowel cancer back in 2016, she was told she had only an 8 per cent chance of surviving to five years. Indeed, if Deb complained about anything, then it was the desperate need to increase funding to cancer services, so that more people could access the world-class care she received.

And now, thanks to Deb and the Bowel Babe Fund, they will. I am so unbelievably glad that Deb got to see how loved she was before she died -  the millions of pounds raised, the Damehood. Even in her final days, she was making a difference, forcing herself out to Royal Ascot and the Chelsea Flower Show, and changing the way we view end of life care.

Now, I’m looking up at the sky for her, in that futile way you do when someone dies. Then I realise that Deb is still here. She hasn’t gone anywhere. She lives on in our hearts and our memories and in the minds of the people who are surviving bowel cancer now because of her.

Of course she does. Of course.