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Tracey Crouch on her cancer fight: ‘I'm one of the lucky ones – now I’m off to max out on life’

Tracey Crouch: ‘I struggle with trying to focus just on what’s happening now and not worry too much about what the future will bring’ - Jonathan Buckmaster/Daily Express
Tracey Crouch: ‘I struggle with trying to focus just on what’s happening now and not worry too much about what the future will bring’ - Jonathan Buckmaster/Daily Express

Tracey Crouch clearly remembers the day she discovered a lump in her breast, because she had just been on a mammoth 30-mile ride on the bike she bought at the beginning of Lockdown 1.

The former sports minister was aching so badly on June 14 last year that although she had already had a shower that day, she decided to jump in her four-year-old son Freddie’s bath later that evening. It was then that she found a “thickened area, shaped like a thumb” in her right breast.

Announcing her diagnosis on Twitter 10 days later, the notoriously competitive, sports-mad Tory MP for Chatham and Aylesford signalled her intention to “go into this challenge studs up” while advising “everyone to check their bits n bobbins”.

Seven months on and two surgeries – to remove two tumours, potentially cancerous tissue and lymph nodes – later, Crouch celebrated her last round of chemotherapy with a glass of fizz in January and her last round of radiotherapy this Tuesday with a tweet declaring: “Off to max out on life now”.

Her upbeat tone caught the attention of more than 14,000 Twitter users including Harry Kane, captain of her beloved Tottenham Hotspur.

“You should be really proud of yourself, the courage you’ve shown has been truly amazing,” said the England striker, leaving the mother-of-one, it’s fair to say, “overwhelmed”.

Although Crouch insists she is one of the “lucky” ones, having had the “perfectly treatable” cancer detected early and treated swiftly under the care of Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust, the experience has left her a woman on a mission.

She may have turned down a ministerial job in Boris Johnson’s cabinet in July 2019 to spend more time with her family, but being unexpectedly diagnosed a month before her 45th birthday has understandably given her a different perspective on life. And “wellbeing” has become her new buzzword.

Having been diagnosed with incidental depression in 2012 and placed on antidepressants by her GP, Crouch knew that the mindfulness techniques she learnt during that difficult period would help her through treatment, which actually wasn’t as bad as she expected, she says.

“I feel really bad,” she admits, “because I’m a chemo buddy to a constituent, who was in the ward, post-surgery, with me. She’s been dreadful. She was sick 40 times in 48 hours. I’ve felt sick but I haven’t been sick. The most I’ve had is extreme tiredness.”

But she now wonders if the “high levels of anxiety” she suffered from eight years ago, while working in the political arena, may have been partly responsible for her cancer diagnosis in the first place.

“Work has always been a complete saviour for me so I was absolutely fine at work, but I found it very difficult when I was not at work,” she says. “One of the biggest contributors to changes in our body that can lead to cancer is stress.”

Although she didn’t necessarily recognise herself as stressed at the time, “if I were to go back into government in the future,” she says, “I’d like to make sure I did things in a more manageable way to reduce any stress and try to make sure that there’s a healthy balance between work and family.”

Yet having been forced to take an even further step back from the work she loves, and diagnosed with a cancer that kills around 11,500 women and 85 men every year in the UK, hasn’t it been hard to keep anxiety levels under control?

From a work perspective, things have not been as difficult because the pandemic has kept largely all of her colleagues at home and contributing to the Commons virtually.

“The bit that I do struggle with is trying to focus just on what’s happening now and not worry too much about what the future will bring,” she admits. “Obviously I have a soon to be five-year-old and I am scared of [the cancer] recurring in the future.

“If I said I don’t worry about not seeing Freddie grow up, I’d be a liar. I wake up in the middle of the night fearing that I’m not going to see him reach an age where I know what kind of man he’s going to turn into.

“I think any parent would worry about that. But what I’m trying to focus on is looking after myself. That’s all I have control of. It’s about having coping mechanisms. That’s where I think the Government can help in helping youngsters learn these methods to create that resilience against anxiety.”

There is a suggestion that children could be allowed to partake in team sports from the end of March to avoid the ‘calamitous’ impact lockdown is having on young people’s mental and physical health. But team sports for adults are set to be banned until summer.

Crouch believes Whitehall should be reconfigured so that sport, mental health and wellbeing are “all put under one roof”.

Explaining how these elements could be hived off from the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) to create a new ministry, she explains: “The treatment should lie with DHSC, but not the prevention. We need to be preventing people from getting to that acute stage when they are having to go to the doctor in the first place by encouraging people to look after their wellbeing more.

“In my new imaginary department would be everything that stops somebody from becoming a Department for Health responsibility. So, obesity strategy would fit into my new fantasy ministry but fitting a gastric band would still lie with DHSC.”

The qualified FA coach, who plays football with the UK Women’s Parliamentary Football Team, believes Covid provides the perfect opportunity to change the status quo. “I think that good physical and mental health and wellbeing should be front and centre of our recovery strategy. We put a lot of emphasis on making sure that people are physically well and we now need to do that in terms of mental wellbeing.”

Crouch cites her own example of being able to come off antidepressants as a result of dedicating more time to mindfulness, meditation and breathing exercises.

“I needed the antidepressants at the time, there’s absolutely no doubt about it,” she says. “But what I now have are mechanisms to stop me from reaching high levels of anxiety and going back on to antidepressants.

“I was always really sceptical of meditation. I was thrown out of a yoga class for laughing. I’d never really been into it at all – and then I became a convert.”

She says the breathing techniques proved particularly helpful during MRI and other scans, when she was “surrounded by tubes”.

Crouch, a qualified FA coach, believes Whitehall should be reconfigured so that sport, mental health and wellbeing are all under one roof - Nigel Roddis, The FA/Getty
Crouch, a qualified FA coach, believes Whitehall should be reconfigured so that sport, mental health and wellbeing are all under one roof - Nigel Roddis, The FA/Getty

And so too, has exercise. While she remains resolutely loyal to the Prime Minister, whose fiancée Carrie Symonds is a close personal friend, she disagrees with the Government’s restrictions on exercise during this third lockdown.

“I’m glad that we reversed the position on angling but I’m sad we didn’t do the same with golf,” she says. “It’s a very socially distanced pursuit anyway.

“There is something bizarre about the fact that me and my other half Steve can spend the day indoors together but we can’t go outside and play golf.

“I feel the same about tennis. Most people who want to play tennis together are grown-ups who take their responsibilities seriously but want to maintain good physical health.”

Along with the stalwart support of Steve, a BBC radio presenter, Crouch has also been buoyed by the kindness of others, which has sometimes come from unexpected quarters.

Jess Phillips [Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley], bless her, sent me a silk pillowcase because she said that when her mum lost her hair, she found cotton really itchy against her stubbly head.”

Not that losing all her hair, eyebrows and eyelashes seems to have bothered Crouch all that much.

Rubbing her hand over her bald head, she jokes: “I quite like it, to be honest with you. I look a bit like a thug. Plus people just don’t notice if you haven’t showered.”

Yet of course in her case, it was a shower – and then a bath – that ended up saving her life.

For information and support on breast cancer, visit: breastcancernow.org or breastcanceruk.org.uk