It isn’t the scarf Amy Dowden tucks neatly around her bald head which is the first change you notice when you meet the Strictly Come Dancing dancer now. It’s her eyes.
While her smile remains knockout and her face immaculate, they are windows to her exhaustion. “I’m starting to lose my eyelashes, my hair follicles are dying, so your eyes stream more because they’re sensitive,” she explains. It’s more than that, though.
When we met last week it was the day before the 33-year-old’s fifth round of chemotherapy; her “best day” she explains. She undergoes a cycle every other week and it is only on the eve of each that she feels truly well because it takes that long to recover.
I last interviewed the Welsh ballroom and Latin star in mid-June, six days after her single mastectomy and four weeks after her diagnosis of grade three aggressive breast cancer.
The Strictly Come Dancing star developed the life-threatening side-effects that can come with chemo (Rowan Griffiths / Daily Mirror)It is hard to exaggerate the distress she has suffered since then. It is not only chemotherapy which is causing her fatigued eyes, but trauma. Both her first and second cycles of chemo resulted in emergency hospital stays and life-threatening complications. First came sepsis, then blood clots.
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“After both my first cycles I developed the life-threatening side-effects that can come with chemo, so I had it all in the first month,” she says. However she doesn’t like to “dwell” on negatives. She has not had any counselling and relies on the support of her husband Ben Jones, a professional dancer with whom she runs a dance school near their Midlands home, and her parents, siblings and close friends.
After her first chemo she “felt great”, going for a five-mile walk with her dad two days later – but collapsing soon after. “I had a temperature and didn’t realise the severity of having a temperature. I stood up, collapsed, Mum rang the emergency number and they said ‘phone an ambulance immediately’. From there everything got very serious.
“I remember going into hospital and them telling me I had an infection, but the following day it got very bad, I was unresponsive to antibiotics for hours. My last memory is a load of doctors around me in the early hours of Sunday morning. On Monday a nurse explained I had gone into septic shock. They said my blood pressure was that low my vital organs would have started failing.”
Amy is unable to recall much from her time in intensive care. She explains: “I had severely low blood pressure, a low heart rate, I wasn’t passing urine for 14 hours, my infection markers were at dangerous levels. I had three different types of antibiotics and I finally responded to the third type.
Amy opened up to the Mirror amid her treatment for breast cancer (Rowan Griffiths / Daily Mirror)“We met the paramedics a week later and they said if I had gone to bed that night I might not have woken up the next morning.” The sepsis was caused by an infection she picked just up before her treatment.
Assured by her oncologist that she had been unlucky, Amy pressed ahead with her second cycle of chemo, only to be faced again by terrifying circumstances. “I got blood clots, I ended up back in hospital,” she explains. They occurred in her left arm because of complications caused by her port, fitted to a vein to help administer chemo drugs.
“I had the chemo on the Thursday and ended up in hospital on the Monday until the Wednesday,” she says. “My arm swelled up and went purple and I was really short of breath. So I was rushed back in. It was frightening, too. I’m on blood thinners now for six months.”
To say that Amy has been unlucky is an understatement. After developing Crohn’s disease, an inflammatory bowel condition, aged 11, she has become used to ill health. Since joining Strictly in 2017, she has faced frequent bouts. But these potentially fatal side-effects of her cancer treatment have been deeply disturbing.
Amy discovered a lump in her breast just a day before she went on her honeymoon in April, a belated trip following her 2022 marriage to Ben, with whom she won the British National Latin Dance Championships. She had only just begun checking herself, following a charity trek with the breast cancer charity CoppaFeel!
When we met in June she was awaiting her histology report post mastectomy, and was confident she would only need radiotherapy and might even dance normally on Strictly this season. Doctors had removed three tumours and further cancer “specks”, plus some lymph nodes from her right breast.
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She later learnt she had tested negative for the hereditary BRCA gene – a surprise because her mum has been through cancer. But days afterwards, she received bad news. Doctors had discovered a second type of breast cancer in the tissue they removed, plus more tumours, including one close to her chest, and specks in her other breast. They need investigating once she finishes chemotherapy.
Amy and her beloved husband Ben at the 2018 BBC Sports Personality Of The Year (WireImage)
The Strictly star is hopeful she and Ben will still be able to have children in the future (BBC/Ray Burmiston)“It was a bit of a shock,” she says. “The doctor said he was not expecting to find this. I think I’ll have to consider another mastectomy.” Her first reaction to chemotherapy was to refuse it: “I thought that’s Strictly with a partner wiped out, that’s my hair gone, that’s my life gone. I was like, I don’t want to do that.
“I was pretty adamant up until the day before, I had a meltdown, a crying fit going ‘I don’t want to do it’.” Doctors told her she would be reducing her survival chances. “My surgeon kept telling me, ‘You can dance forever and ever afterwards’.”
But ultimately, it was her former dance teacher in Wales who said something which cut through. It was related to Amy undergoing IVF to create and freeze embryos before starting treatment, hoping that she and Ben might still have children.
The dancer recalls: “She gave me tough love and said ‘what’s the point of these embryos if you’re not going to have chemo? Because you won’t be around to have these babies anyway’.” Deep down, Amy knew chemo was right. Her fifth cycle has been a different type, which can be harder to withstand. She has been sent home with oral morphine for pain.
Already suffering bouts of vomiting and severe fatigue, she is nervous when we meet. But she has an end goal. All being well, come early next month, she will be finished. And then, she might allow herself hope – she barely dares say it – of a return to Strictly.
“I dream every night of being back on the dance floor,” she says. “But I don’t want to set myself up for disappointment.”
Of that, she has had enough.
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