Show Notes
How do you keep going when your world falls apart? Can you make a difference and turn a bad thing into a good thing? Is it possible to get your fitness back when treatment ends? To kick off Season 3 of So Now I’ve Got Breast Cancer, I’m speaking to a very special guest, the Olympian Donna Fraser OBE. She’s a quadruple Olympian sprinter who was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2009 while she was still a professional athlete. She has since been awarded an OBE for her services to equality, inclusion and diversity in the workplace and is a proud ambassador for the charity Breast Cancer Now.
Here are the resources that Donna mentioned: Breast Cancer Now https://breastcancernow.org/ Her Spirit App https://www.herspirit.co.uk/ Donna’s website www.donnafraserofficial.com
If you’re a person of colour going through a breast cancer diagnosis, you may also find these support groups useful: Black Women Rising - https://www.blackwomenrisinguk.org/ South Asian supernovas - @southasiansupernovas
****** My amazing podcast poet is Donna Ashworth and you heard a poem from her new book ‘Growing Brave’ - available now in all online bookstores. You can find out more about Donna on her website, or follow her on Instagram and Facebook
Season Three was kindly sponsored by Breast Friends CIC – an organisation that truly understands the power of peer support for anyone on the breast cancer journey. Head over to www.breastfriends.co.uk to find out more. If you would like to sponsor Season Four, please get in touch at [email protected].
If you’ve got a question for the show, then please get in touch online or send me a voice note. You can find me on social media - Instagram, X and Facebook. A special thanks goes to medical student Tamara Enthoven for helping me to collate all the questions.
You can also watch this episode! Head to my Youtube channel @DrLizORiordan to see this season’s episodes as they are released and lots of other useful videos full of reliable information.
Subscribe to my monthly newsletter here to find out what I’ve been up to and what I’m recommending each month.
And you can now pre-order my third book ‘The Cancer Roadmap’ (out January 2025), or buy the updated edition of my first book ‘The Complete Guide to Breast Cancer: How to Feel Empowered and Take Control’. Plus, if you’re nosey and want to find out more about my life, my memoir ‘Under The Knife’ - is also available in all good bookshops. Finally, if you loved the show and want to help other women like you find it, you can leave a 5-star review wherever you get your podcasts, or you can show your support to help keep the show going and buy me a coffee
More from So Now I’ve Got Breast Cancer
Rebecca Charlton is the voice of cycling on Channel 5, as well as a cycling journalist and author, and in the summer of 2025, she was diagnosed with breast cancer while she was breast-feeding her second child. She’s had to navigate presenting on TV whilst dealing with the aftermath of treatment and coming to terms with her delayed diagnosis, and I can’t wait for you to hear her story.
Did you know that after breast surgery your scars can become stuck and painful? This is where a good scar therapist can come in, and I wish I’d known this sooner after my mastectomy. Joana Pedroso is a trained cancer scar therapist who wants everyone to be able to move freely again and she explained why scars get stuck and what we can do about it.
It’s the elephant in the room that no-one talks about when you have cancer - the fact that your sex life can also take a nose dive. But there is support out there, and this episode I’m speaking to Instagram’s @cancersextherapist - aka Zoe Yessian - a registered Mental Health nurse and psychosexual and relationship therapist, who was diagnosed with breast cancer herself two years ago aged just 35. We discuss how cancer can affect our libido and desire and what we can do about it.
I hope this episode bring you as much joy as it did to me to record it - self-proclaimed cancer kicker, poetry prattler, sales director, photo-grapher, animal lover and nature bather (and possibly the world’s wonkiest qualified personal trainer) Dearbhaile O’Hale aka Derv turned to writing when she was diagnosed with breast cancer to help her process the experience. She was generous enough to share some of her poems with us in this special episode, and talk about her own story from diagnosis to now. I hope her words give you some comfort, or perhaps she will inspire you to write yourself.
How do you know what to trust online and even - dare I say it - in podcasts, when it comes to breast cancer? There is so much information out there nowadays including people claiming to have “cures” and alternatives to traditional treatments. That’s why I needed to get Consultant Oncologist and Chief Medical Officer for Macmillan, Richard Simcock, onto this episode to help us sift through fact and fiction.