CORDELIA Taylor has had a quarter of her brain removed but she is still with us, more than four years after being told the cancer she had would kill her within 18 months.
But to Cordelia, it’s her seven-year-old daughter Lolita Oakes who is “phenomenal”.
Lolita and her best friend Juliet Deilinger, also seven, ran a full marathon distance over the course a week last month.
It came after Cordelia, from Kentish Town, North London, was told in June that her cancer was back — and the new tumour was aggressive and inoperable.
She is hoping to self-fund a private biopsy and potential targeted treatment of the tumour, which inspired Loli’s bid to raise money.
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The GoFundMe page for the epic run currently stands at £74,000, with a target of £100,000.
Cordelia, 41, was shocked when her cancer returned, but nothing dims the wonder she has for her marathon-running daughter.
She says: “Loli is joyful and spirited, full of happiness and confidence. She’s a very determined girl and unbelievably good at saying to herself, ‘I can do this’.”
Loli ran at least three miles before school every day for seven days, clocking up more miles afterwards.
Dance in the woods
Throughout the week, the girls were joined by Juliet’s ten-year-old sister, Scarlett plus a growing band of friends, classmates and teachers — “a bit like Forrest Gump”, says Cordelia.
“It was quite hard, how much I had to run, and the not stopping,” Loli tells Sun Health.
“The hardest part was when I fell over. It was tiring, but I’m proud of me and Juliet for running the marathon, and doing it for my mum.”
When Cordelia asks why she ran it, Loli replies: “I didn’t want you to die.”
She describes her mum as “kind — she always comforts people when they’re hurt”.
Cordelia is co-founder and patient navigation lead at actaboveand beyond.co.uk, a consultancy that supports people with cancers that are particularly hard to treat.
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She says: “Loli has a lot of questions around how you catch cancer, because she grew up in the pandemic so she thinks everything is caught from someone else.
“We explained that you can’t catch it and you can’t pass it on.
“She doesn’t know how serious this is because we feel that until I know I’ve got ‘this long’ left, then we don’t need to tell her that.”
In 2018, aged 36, Cordelia was “totally fine”.
She recalls: “I was very healthy, travelling a lot. I was working in Northern Ireland and was about to leave the house to get on a flight.
“We went shopping — nothing about the day suggested anything was wrong. But I had a seizure and collapsed.
“Loli was with me. Thank God my mum was there, too.
“I was blue-lighted to hospital and they discovered a ginormous brain tumour that had been growing for five to ten years.
“The doctors couldn’t believe it.”
Cordelia was diagnosed with stage 4 brain cancer, called glioblastoma.
It is a diagnosis more than 3,000 people face every year, including The Wanted star Tom Parker, who died from the disease in 2022.
Average survival time is 12-18 months and only five per cent of patients live more than five years.
Before Cordelias had surgery, her neurosurgeon told her to go on holiday, because it was a very risky operation.
Cordelia says: “The way I dealt with it was to try to go in feeling very positive and motivational to my surgical team.”
She held a procession to the operating theatre with friends and family.
Her mum, who is Spanish, danced the paso doble on the hospital bed, and Cordelia gave her surgical team a card that said “B is for Badass” to stick on the wall.
“I said, ‘If you are having a slight doubt, I want you to look at that and remember how much of a badass you are, and you are going to do the best surgery you’ve ever done. And if you don’t, you’ve got my mum to contend with’.
“They went and they did. Every clinical person who looks at those scans now says, ‘Wow!’
“Surgeons removed 98 per cent of the tumour, leaving just two per cent. The surgery took out over a quarter of my brain and I had no neurological defects.
“The brain is incredible. It’s just amazing what it can do.”
Cordelia named her tumour Buttercup, because it ended up “shining a beautiful light on everything”.
She says: “When I woke from surgery, the world had changed.
“It was like a hyperfocus. All the colours were unbelievably bright and this lasted for a very long time.
“It was just gratitude for the world, life and everything in it.”
Following surgery, and to tackle the final two per cent, Cordelia “threw the kitchen sink” at her cancer, opting for chemotherapy and treatment in America, Germany and Israel.
She says: “We don’t know exactly what worked, but something did. Six months later, my scans were completely clear.”
And they remained that way until October last year, when a small new tumour appeared, exactly four years on from her first diagnosis.
“I immediately went on to chemotherapy again and in four cycles it had gone, which was amazing.”
Cordelia was back to being cancer-free. Her scan in April was clear — but then in June, it wasn’t.
“It was a huge shock. There was this aggressive tumour. Within three months it was very big and had spread far into my brain,” she says.
“I’m on chemo, which has been very heavy-hitting. I’m exhausted.” Cordelia spent a “week or two processing it all, devastated, utterly terrified and accepting of it”.
Then, she says: “One day, I just decided that’s not me. I don’t just accept these things. Life really has to go on, especially with a child.
“I said to Loli, ‘We’ve got a choice. Mummy can either stay in bed and feel sorry for herself, or we can go and dance in the woods. What do you think we should do?’
“She said: ‘We should go and dance in the woods, Mummy.’
“So that’s what we did, and is what every day has been like since.
“We dance around the kitchen table, we dance in the rain. We dance anywhere and everywhere.
“And for me, the most important thing is knowing that my daughter understands that when life throws you challenges, you have a choice and it’s how you deal with it that will impact everything.
“You’ve got to keep going. There’s no point in living life like it’s over, until it actually is.”
To donate to Cordelia's GoFundMe page, click here.
