Valerie TAYLOR “I've been blessed”

At 83, Valerie Taylor has survived close encounters with the most dangerous sharks on the planet but she brushes them off as mere trifles. Valerie’s most terrifying encounter, she reveals exclusively to Jenny Brown, was with breast cancer.

In the beginning, there were seven other women in the Sydney breast cancer clinic with Valerie Taylor. They endured fear and pain side by side, swapped stories, shared secrets and encouraged each other through the awful side effects of chemotherapy. As time passed, they continued to meet for lunch or coffee while their numbers gradually, inexorably dwindled. Ultimately, only two of them were left. And then, sadly, Valerie became the sole survivor of their friendship group.

Aged 50, the vibrant Australian diver renowned for swimming with sharks had taken on humanity’s most pitiless predator – cancer – and lived to tell the tale, despite the direst of medical predictions.

“I was told I had only a 25 per cent chance of surviving,” says Valerie, now 83 and revealing her cancer struggle for the first time after more than three decades. “The doctors thought I wouldn’t make it, but I knew I would.

“It’s peculiar because the other seven women in the clinic had a better prognosis than me, yet they all died. One by one they dropped off until there was just the two of us. I asked the other lovely woman, Liz, not to tell me if her cancer came back. But she did.”