‘CANCER? I'll always be looking over my shoulder'

Sky News sports presenter Jacquie Beltrao has bravely battled breast cancer twice. The 56-year-old talks exclusively to Woman about her shock diagnosis and looking to the future

You were only 48 when you were first diagnosed…

I was, which is quite young for breast cancer. It gave me such a wake-up call. It’s a terrible thing to say but I thought I would be the last person of everyone I know to get ill, so I want to encourage people to be vigilant from an early age. No one is immune. A lot of the people who follow me on social media and have breast cancer are young.

How did you feel about it?

Absolute horror. It was Christmas Eve in 2013. When you get a cancer diagnosis you immediately think, ‘I’m going to die.’ My children weren’t young, but they were young enough to be terrified. My mum died at 42 when I was 18. When I was diagnosed I just thought, ‘Oh, God, history’s repeating itself and my children will have to go through all their milestones in life without me.’ Then you find out more and you realise actually, in most cases, it’s really treatable. It’s a bump in your road that you can get over. But at first, you’re horrified. It’s as if a black hole has opened inside you.

Then you were diagnosed a second time, in June 2020?

I found a really small lump near my collarbone. People don’t realise breast tissue goes all the way up to the collarbone. It was tiny, like an uncooked grain of rice. It turned out to be super aggressive and it had already left the breast and spread, which makes it a stage-four cancer and incurable. It’s treatable, it’s just not curable – and that’s the really scary cancer to have. You know it’s going to kill you in the end; you just don’t know when.