Yahoo News Leading headteacher Bernice McCabe reveals she has the same incurable brain cancer that killed Tessa Jowell
One of the country’s most renowned headteachers today publicly revealed that she has the same incurable brain cancer that killed Tessa Jowell.
Bernice McCabe, a friend and aide to Prince Charles, spoke of her diagnosis of a grade 4 glioblastoma as she backed a campaign to make immunotherapy available on the NHS for brain tumours.
After undergoing neurosurgery to remove 90 per cent of the tumour, Mrs McCabe, 65, has received the life-extending drug ipilimumab privately at University College London Hospital, with promising results.
The size of the remaining tumour has shrunk by more than half and her quality of life has improved.
She says it is her “mission” to help raise £250,000 to run the first NHS trials, which are due to start in October.
“This is the next stage of my life,” she told the Evening Standard. “It’s the next chapter. You have got to learn to write the story of your own life.
“It’s blindingly obvious to me that this is something that ought to be trialled and developed. It’s a terrible diagnosis but I’m feeling well.
“I have had treatment since February 23 and I have seen my quality of life increasingly improve.
“With glioblastoma, you have got between two months and two years to live, on average. I wanted something more optimistic than that. That is what the immunotherapy has given me.”
Mrs McCabe stepped down as head of North London Collegiate School, an independent fee-paying girls’ school in Edgware, after 20 years last August but remains a consultant.
The school’s former pupils include Anna Wintour, Rachel Weisz and Esther Rantzen. Mrs McCabe’s tumour was discovered in January when she fell ill on returning from the school’s sister institution in South Korea.
She received a marriage proposal from long-term partner Rod MacKinnon, 59, also a headteacher, the day before surgery at Addenbrooke’s hospital, Cambridge, in February. They married at St Bride’s church, Fleet Street, in April.
She was awarded an OBE in the New Year’s honours list and was well enough to receive it from Prince Charles at Buckingham Palace in June. She is co-director of the Prince’s teaching Institute charity.
Mrs McCabe said: “I have never shed a tear or felt the slightest bit of anger about what has happened to me. What is the point? These few months that I have had are priceless.
“I’ve had hundreds of wonderful cards from colleagues and former students. They have been enormously bolstering.
“I want to show them that it’s possible to fight a good battle against cancer. A lot of people feel that the treatment is utterly terrifying and appalling. I have not found that to be so. I have suffered very, very few side effects.
“It’s never been presented to me as a cure. It’s been presented to me as something that could potentially work to improve the length of life and quality of life.”
Glioblastoma is the most common and most aggressive brain tumour, with about 2,200 UK cases a year. Baroness Jowell, the former Olympics minister, died in May aged 70. Ipilimumab is already successfully used to treat melanoma skin cancer.
Dr Paul Mullholland, the consultant oncologist leading the trials at UCLH, said: “This is the most important trial for brain cancer patients in the last 15 years.”
