After leaving school in Peterhead, Scotland, I trained as a nurse in Edinburgh. One of my placements was as a nurse in the Western General Hospital cancer unit, where I felt both challenged and rewarded by the work. It was a place where I could have meaningful relationships not just with patients but with their family members as well, unlike the general wards where people came, had their procedures and left.
The technical aspects of cancer care were fast paced and developing and you needed to support people with quite complicated treatments and side effects. As a result, I went on to train in London at St Bart’s as an oncology nurse. In 1991, I returned to Edinburgh and took up a position as a clinical nurse specialist in the Breast Unit at Western General Hospital.
At that time I met the women who significantly changed the direction my life. Her name was Maggie Keswick Jencks and she had been told that she had three months left to live, after developing secondary cancer in her liver, bones and bone marrow.
Maggie was a lovely thoughtful woman, but what made her stand out from the outset was her need to be proactively involved in understanding the treatment decisions and what the alternative treatment options could be. Today, this is much more common among cancer patients, but at the time the landscape was more of following what you were told to do by your consultant and asking no questions.
Maggie spent a lot of the last few months of her life thinking about how she could live well after a cancer diagnosis. Her words of encouragement to others was “not to lose the joy of living in the fear of dying”. We talked at length as I gave her chemotherapy treatment. We discussed her ideas and beliefs, recognising how emotional support is as critical as medical support patients experiencing cancer. Maggie was such a doer and I eventually travelled with her to America to explore the support centres available there for people with cancer.
On her return Maggie spotted a small old building beside Edinburgh General Hospital that used to be an ice store. She came up with a blueprint for how the building could become a cancer caring centre that would offer benefits advice, information, peer support, relaxation and nutrition classes. Critically, it would be a place to go that was run by professional experts who understood the tools that individuals needed to help them make sense of their cancer diagnosis.
Maggie died with the blueprint of that first centre on her bed before it was open, but it was clear that I needed to be the one to make that first centre work and thrive. At the time it was a very bold move to jump out of the NHS trajectory to join a charity with no track record and no sense of whether or not it was going to succeed. But, it was because of Maggie that I did it. Today her legacy and vision live on in the 19 Centres across the UK that bear her name, and thousands of people have been supported by Maggie’s Centres.
About the author
Laura Lee is the CEO of Maggie’s. She has led the organisation since the inception of Maggie Keswick Jencks Cancer Caring Centres Trust in 1998 and has overseen the development of 17 Maggie’s Centres across the UK, online and abroad.
