TAKING CANCER TO THE CATWALK X

Teacher Mary Jones reflects on the extraordinary way her breast cancer diagnosis challenged her view on womanhood and ultimately led her to a London catwalk

Mary Jones is not a warrior. Nor does she identify as a "brave soul". She is a schoolteacher - more recently a model, too - who's still facing cancer's twists and turns.

Mary was 31 when she was diagnosed with Stage 3 breast cancer - 18 months after she first felt a lump poking beneath the skin of her right breast.

It was early January 2022 when she received the call; a doctor uttering those dreaded words, "It's cancer." "I wasn't really aware of breast cancer in younger women," explains Mary now.

She cracks a grin as she talks, her hair piled in blonde waves on top of her head.

"It was something that I'd heard about in the older generation.

"It's always someone's auntie or someone's mother or someone's grandmother who's been diagnosed with breast cancer." During the year and a half it took to diagnose the cancer, doctors in Kenya, where Mary lived, were slow to detect anything worrying about her lump. She didn't have any family history of the disease and she was "far too young".

So, Mary was sent off with lazy phrases "It's. nothing to worry about," and "It's just a cyst". There was no reason to push further and no reason why Mary should be concerned herself - after all, the doctors knew best, didn't they?

But then her world turned on its head.

"Fast forward nine months or something, I get a phone call from my mum," says Mary. "She'd been diagnosed with Stage 2 breast cancer.

"And my thought from there was, 'Oh no, Mum's got cancer. I've also got a lump in my breast and now I've got family history as well.

"I didn't tell my mum - I was obviously just focusing on her and the phone call. I got off the phone in shock, knowing I needed to push for a proper examination. And this is something that a lot of younger women have to do - push to get a scan or an ultrasound.

"So, I went to go and get it checked.