Actress Nadia Sawalha on her determination to support women with cancer and marking a milestone birthday
MITYA UNDERWOOD
As Loose Women favourite Nadia Sawalha approaches her 60th birthday this year, she’s not taking any moments for granted.
The telly favourite has spent years fighting for her friend Hannah Gardner, who has secondary incurable breast cancer, facing off against MPs in Westminster and spending hours by her side while she gets treatment in hospital.
As she tells new, it’s given her a whole new perspective on life. And while Nadia admits that it takes an emotional toll, the mum-of-two says she doesn’t want to live with regret that she could have done more.
“Every week I go to the hospital and I leave exhausted from the heat, the noise, from people coming in and out, and I’m not even having anything done. Hannah has got a three-year-old autistic child and she’s having all this treatment. She’s exhausted, she’s scared and she always shows up. So, she gives us all energy.”
Nadia and Hannah, 37, are fighting alongside two other friends (they call themselves The Fab Four) for the breast cancer drug Trastuzumab deruxtecan (sold as Enhertu) to be made available by NHS England.
While it’s currently available to women in Scotland, the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence declined to recommend it for use in England, and Nadia has been campaigning on behalf of the thousands of women she believes are missing out on the potentially life-extending treatment.
“The four of us were all together when she was given her secondary breast cancer diagnosis and we were all trying to make her feel better, saying, ‘But you know, there’s lots of lines of treatment.’ And she just looked at us and she said, ‘I’m not going to be an old lady in my bed though.’ And it always echoes in my head…
“Lots of people are saying, ‘You’re 60 this year, how does it feel?’ When you’re around people that are having to fight so hard when they are ill to get treatment that so many others get without question, it drives you forward.”
Something she finds disturbing is that she doesn’t think there would be a postcode lottery if it was related to men’s health.
“I don’t believe this would happen the other way around, I genuinely don’t,” she said. “There are terrible discrepancies between men and women in the medical w
