I recall them vividly – the days before everything changed.
Fizzing with happiness, I waved a thick folder of documents and printouts at my husband of eight months, Ben. ‘Passports, tickets, hotel reservations… we’re all set!’ He eyed me with amusement.
I was sitting in a sea of discarded clothes on our bedroom floor, next to a suitcase spilling over with bikinis and sundresses. ‘Are you sure about that?’ he said.
It was April 2023. I was 32, and this was our honeymoon I was packing for. Our wedding had been the year before, but our schedules had been so busy, we’d not had a chance to go yet. It was going to be a luxury, once-in-a-lifetime holiday in the Maldives, with gorgeous food, gorgeous weather and – best of all – pure me and Ben time.
But first we had to get through a busy weekend in Blackpool, where some of our students were competing in the 2023 British Open Formation Championship. In 2016 – a year before I began as a professional dancer on Strictly Come Dancing – Ben and I fulfilled a dream by setting up our own dance academy in the West Midlands, and this was one of the highlights of our year.
Strictly professional Amy Dowden was diagnosed with breast cancer, had a mastectomy and almost died from sepsis
That Saturday morning, I got up and jumped in the shower, letting the hot water pound against my skin and wake me up. Skimming my hand over my right breast, I felt a slight swelling. Was it a lump? I didn’t have time to examine it properly and hurried to get dressed, but it stayed in the back of my mind.
After two long and busy days in the ballroom, it was time to go home. At last we could unwind and get excited about going on honeymoon. That night, hoping the swelling had gone, I checked my breasts properly and had a really good feel. In my right breast, I could make out a solid, oval shape that moved when I pressed it. ‘There is a lump’, I thought, and my heart sank.
I didn’t say anything to Ben, because I knew he would insist on going straight to the doctor, and then we’d miss our flight.
I told myself over and over it was probably benign, but the truth is, deep down I knew it wasn’t. My mum had been diagnosed with breast cancer when she was 50. It was in our family.
The Maldives felt like paradise, with its huge skies, turquoise seas and powdery white beaches, but for me there was a shadow hanging over everything. I tried to enjoy myself, but my happiness felt like a mask.
Every time I put suntan lotion on, I could feel the lump in my breast. And maybe I was imagining it, but it felt like it was getting bigger. I really needed someone to talk to, but I couldn’t bring myself to ruin Ben’s holiday.
Back in the UK, having developed an ominous cough, too, I booked a GP appointment, still in secret. I’ll never forget watching her expression change from smiling reassurance to serious concern as she felt the lump. She took a tape measure and noted its exact size, then picked up her phone and made a call. ‘I need to make an emergency referral,’ she said.
That call marked the beginning of one of the toughest periods of my life, and I don’t say that lightly. I’d faced tough times before, after all – I’d suffered from the debilitating stomach illness, Crohn’s disease, since I was a child, making it harder than it already was to get to the top of a tough profession.
I’d battled hard to be taken seriously, to win competitions, to get on to Strictly. I was the only female British pro on the show. And yet this was different. As I awaited the results of the biopsy that was now ordered, I told myself I could do it. I could get through it.
Only, I felt so scared.
Amy with Karim Zeroual on Strictly Come Dancing in 2019 – the pair made it all the way to the grand final of the competition
Amy in dance costume aged eight as she attended dance classes every week
In the summer of 2004, just when I didn’t think I could be any more obsessed with dancing, Strictly Come Dancing hit our screens for the first time.
I was nearly 14 years old, and by then I lived for the dance lessons I had every week, financed by Dad’s hard work as a carpenter for a property development company. Everything about Strictly entranced me.
My twin sister Rebecca and I would tape it and play it back over and over: if we saw any tricky or clever choreography, we’d practise it in the front room of our house in Caerphilly, Wales, until we thought we’d got it right. In no time at all, I was telling everybody: ‘I want to be a professional dancer on Strictly Come Dancing.’
Of course no one believed I ever would be. My Crohn’s was by then landing me in hospital once every few months. And, besides, though I entered plenty of amateur competitions with several different partners throughout my teens, I hadn’t found a boy with whom I could form a really competitive partnership and make my name.
And then along came Ben Jones.
In the dance world, boys have all the power. There are fewer of them, so they can take their pick of the girls, and Ben was a real catch.
I knew him from the competition circuit. He was ambitious and hard-working, and when his previous partnership broke up, I couldn’t believe my luck when he rang me.
At the time, Ben’s parents, Simon and Elaine, were building a bungalow in the garden of their house in Dudley in the West Midlands. It was for his nan, and Ben asked them if I could share it with her. In the dance world, partners generally move in with each other so they can concentrate all their time and effort on their work together.
But why didn’t he come and live with me? Well, he would have been welcome – but that never happens in the dance industry! Annoyingly, the girls always go to the boys – I’ve never heard of it happening the other way round.
By then I was 21, and staying with Ben meant that I got to know him on fast-forward: instead of meeting up to dance and then going our separate ways, we were living in each other’s pockets.
I guess it was only a matter of time before we began to fall in love. His parents were the first to think something was going on between us. They started hearing my footsteps at night as I crept into the house from the bungalow.
Amy wipes away tears as friends and family snip away her hair which had been falling out because of chemotherapy
Amy says she cried more over losing her hair than anything else
Ben and I quickly clicked on the dancefloor too, and really believed we could start aiming for titles. On the competition circuit, Neil and Katya Jones were the couple we adored and looked up to. Not only did we love their style, but they were also winning a lot.
They’re now on Strictly, of course, but at the time they were working with a coach called Richard Porter, an international Latin dance champion and trained choreographer who’s been in demand ever since he retired from professional dancing. We wanted Richard too.
As it happened, he was a judge at the British National Championships in the first full year of our partnership, 2011, so he’d already seen us dance.
It seemed as good a time as any to ask him if he could take us on.
‘Hey, we’d love to book a lesson with you. You judged us last week at the British National Championships. We were in blue and we made the semi-final,’ we emailed him. ‘Hi, don’t remember you, at all,’ was his reply.
That was hard (especially the devastating position of that second comma!). This was a coach who only ever worked with champions. Still, he said he would take a look at us – and eventually agreed to work with us, even though he was based in Los Angeles.
That was a tough time, too. We went out to work with him once every other month and it was incredibly stressful trying to earn enough money to cover the cost of each trip.
A lesson with Richard cost £195 for 45 minutes, and we had a minimum of ten lessons every time we went to LA, so it was a huge outlay.
Yet Richard transformed our dancing. He took us on as nobodies and helped us make a name for ourselves. He could be savage sometimes – he was brutally honest with us and often had me in tears, stopping the music and saying: ‘Again, again, again.’
He’d take me to breaking point – and Ben had it just as bad – because he knew that ultimately this was how to make me the best dancer. Sometimes we would leave his lesson crying, but we still loved him – it was weird.
My sister used to be outraged on my behalf. ‘The way he’s just spoken to you, the messages he’s sent – I don’t know why you’re spending that much money with him! It’s ridiculous.’
But we knew he was the best teacher for us. Richard cared about every single one of our competitions and performances, right down to the colour of our costumes. It was thanks to Richard that Ben and I finally fulfilled our ultimate goal and won the British Nationals in 2016 – leaving me free to start Strictly the next year (you can’t take part in amateur competitions if you’re working as a professional dancer).
I debuted on TV with Brian Conley as my celeb, and in 2019 made it all the way to the grand final with Karim Zeroual. It felt as though every dream I’d ever had was coming true. Four years later – midway through a catch-up lesson with Richard in London, as it happens – a nurse phoned me with my biopsy results.
Amy with her parents Gillian and Richard in 2018…
…and pictured as babies with her sister Rebecca in 1993
It was what we all suspected: I had cancer. Indeed, with every phone call, every appointment, the news seemed to get worse.
I had an MRI scan and more biopsies. At my next appointment the doctor said: ‘It’s grade three out of three, so it’s very aggressive. We think you need a mastectomy.’
‘Let’s do a mastectomy, then,’ I said, even though I knew it meant removing all of the breast tissue, including the nipple.
‘There are specks in the other breast that we are unsure of. Also, we may need to do chemotherapy. But let’s just focus on surgery to begin with.’
It’s weird how quickly your life can change. In a couple of days, I went from having a diary that was absolutely packed to having endless blank pages. Ben and I had been all set to get an extension built on our house, but I even had to cancel the builders.
It was tough telling the Strictly team and my friends on the show. You don’t want to upset people – and it made it feel horribly real, too. They were dancing at the London Palladium that weekend and their day off was on the Monday, so I waited until then. We cried on the phone together.
Even so, I thought I could still do this. I recovered well from surgery – my reconstructed boob looked better than I expected, once I plucked up the courage to look at it – and I hoped I’d get away with radiotherapy and drug therapy alone. Then life could start again. In fact, I felt so well so quickly after the mastectomy, I think I was a little bit deluded. Like, ‘This is easy, done it.’
Yet when I went back to hear what they’d discovered having analysed the tissue they’d taken, the doctor could barely make eye contact with me.
I felt a jolt of fear.
Mum and Dad were with me. We sat down in front of him.
‘It’s not what we thought,’ the doctor said. ‘We found three tumours in total, including a tumour connected to your chest that may explain the cough you had. But what shocked us most was finding lobular cancer as well as the ductal breast cancer we already knew was there.’
My head swam as I tried to take in what he was saying. I knew about the ductal cancer, which is the most common type of breast cancer. It starts in the milk ducts, the tubes that carry milk from the lobules (the milk-producing glands) to the nipple.
Now he was saying he had also found the second most common type of breast cancer, which starts in the lobules and spreads out into the surrounding breast tissue like tree branches. Two types of breast cancer. In one breast.
‘The oncologist and the breast cancer team are recommending that you have a course of chemotherapy.’ I stayed silent. I hadn’t even considered having chemo. No one had yet suggested that.
‘And if they want to do chemotherapy,’ he pressed on, ‘you’ve got a two-week window now for fertility treatment.’
Amy with dance partner Danny John-Jules on 2018’s Strictly Come Dancing
Two weeks? I swallowed hard. Ben and I already knew that I’d be having fertility treatment if we wanted to try for a baby later, because anyone with a hormone-fed cancer, as mine was, is put into menopause. But if I hadn’t needed chemo, the window in which to consider it all would certainly have been longer.
We had no time to feel scared, but instead were given a crash course in fertility. Hours later, I had an internal scan. Ben gave a sperm sample, and I began to inject myself daily for the next two weeks at home in preparation for egg retrieval.
At times I was an emotional mess and broke down in floods of tears. Going through surgery, facing chemo and now putting a lot of hormones into my body, my life had changed so radically in such a short space of time. There were no guarantees, our consultant warned – but at last there was good news.
I responded well, and ten days later, a medical team retrieved nine eggs. Normally, they’d expect two or three embryos from that number, so we were really lucky to end up with five healthy embryos at blastocyst stage. I was over the moon when the hospital rang.
I was working that day in the studio with Carlos [Gu] from Strictly and when I told him, he cried out: ‘I’m a godmother!’
Dianne [Buswell] asked me if they were girls or boys. ‘What? We don’t know that!’ I laughed.
Their reaction made me ache to be with the pro dancers full-time. They were about to go into training for Strictly 2023, but of course I’d been forced to pull out when I was given my diagnosis.
If surgery had been easier than I’d expected, chemo was harder. Instantly harder. A few days after my first dose, when I woke up from a nap and tried to stand, my legs went from under me and I crumpled back onto the settee. I started having pains in my chest and my arm, and my temperature was up. My parents were staying with us to help and swiftly called an ambulance to take me in.
I had sepsis and a suspected clot on the lung.
Sepsis happens when your body overreacts to an infection and causes dangerous levels of inflammation that can lead to organ dysfunction. You can’t catch it from anyone – it happens when your immune system turns on itself. Sadly, Mum knew this only too well because she had lost her sister to sepsis the year before.
I spent a night in hospital, and when Ben rang in the morning to find out how I was, he put the phone on loudspeaker so my parents could hear. ‘She’s not responding to the drugs we’re giving her,’ the doctor told them. Mum and Dad went into meltdown, and for a while thought they were going to lose me.
I don’t remember anything about this, but by the time they’d rushed to the hospital, I’d gone into septic shock, meaning my blood pressure had dropped dramatically, and medics were about to transfer me to the Critical Care unit.
In fact, I’m lucky the doctors recognised I had sepsis, which is sometimes known as ‘the hidden killer’ because it’s difficult to diagnose. We worked out later that I had probably picked up an infection at a dance studio just before I went for chemo.
Fortunately for me, a stronger set of antibiotics worked, and after nearly a week in hospital I managed to get home the day before my 33rd birthday.
There were other dashes to hospital, with blood clots and temperature spikes, and if I’m honest I found those early chemo sessions terrifying. But slowly I grew stronger again – helped in no small measure by my friends at Strictly.
My goal was to get to the show as often as I could. The production team checked that everybody around me was OK – that nobody had a cold or a temperature – and I only went on my good weekends, ten days after having chemo.
But being back in the Strictly fold with my Strictly family was the best medicine. I needed it for my mental health, to have something to look forward to and keep me going.
It’s exciting just being backstage, even when you’re not performing, because you’re still soaking up the joy and glitz and glamour of it all.
And my life away from Strictly was distinctly unglamorous. With each new chemo session, the next challenge was growing more and more obvious. Before I could say goodbye to cancer, I would have to say goodbye to my hair. And I think I cried more over that than anything else.
I would have to trim it, clip it and finally shave it completely – and then face the terrifying decision to appear on national TV with a fuzzy bald head.
Adapted from Dancing in the Rain by Amy Dowden, published by Piatkus on September 5, at £22. © Amy Dowden 2024. To order a copy for £19.80 (Offer valid to 01/09/24; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.