Gogglebox star Nikki Tapper on her battle with breast cancer

'It was August, 2011 and we were on holiday when I found the lump in my breast'

GOGGLEBOX star Nikki Tapper beat her devastating illness after early detection. Now she’s spreading the word to help others.

 

Gogglebox regular and nursery manager Nikki Tapper is 42 and lives in Edgware, London with her husband Jonathan, a 48-year-old executive driver, and their children Josh, 18, and Amy, 15. She says:

“I remember just before I got my results, I went round to my mum’s and had a complete meltdown. My husband – bless him – is the world’s biggest worrier, so I didn’t want to break down there. I was just so scared.

When my specialist said it was early-stage cancer, I was actually relieved

Nikki Tapper

My mum had had breast cancer 10 years earlier – she’s absolutely fine, thank God – and she said, ‘Whatever the result, we’re going to pull through this all together. But you’ve got to be strong for the kids and Jonathan because if not, they’ll all fall apart.’

It was August, 2011 and we were on holiday when I found the lump in my breast. It was quite substantial, bigger than a pea. Thank God we were coming home two days later. 

My uncle is a private GP so I made an appointment to see him, we landed late Thursday night and Friday morning I was in his surgery. He said I needed to go for a mammogram immediately and I just knew. 

It was like being swept on to a conveyor belt. I had the mammogram, followed by an MRI, a biopsy and the worst weekend of my life. I just wanted to be told, ‘This is what it is, and you’re going to be OK.’ I couldn’t think beyond that.

When my specialist said it was early-stage cancer, I was actually relieved. 

 

Reality star Nikki (centre) watches the box with her family

The lump had probably been there for about nine months but it had got to the outside where I felt it as soon as possible, so I was lucky. He said the prognosis was good. I was going to have a lumpectomy and be referred to an oncologist. 

Everything he said was positive. When I came out of the consultation smiling, my husband thought I was off my head. But to me it was the best scenario: being told I’d got cancer but I was going to be OK. 

But the following morning I got a call from the breast nurse saying, ‘I’m really sorry, we’ve found something else in the MRI and we need you to come back for more biopsies.’ My heart just completely sank.

I had three lumps in the same breast. The one I found was on the outside, then there was one diagonally inside, which was hiding. The third was so small it wouldn’t have shown on a mammogram. Two of them were stage two, the other was stage one and as far as they could see from the MRI scan, it hadn’t spread to my lymph glands, but I still needed a mastectomy. 

From then on I didn’t even process half the things I was told. Everything was explained in fine detail but I didn’t even question anything. I put my life in their hands and did what I was told. I just wanted the cancer out of me. 

It was horrendous. It was 10 days since I’d stepped off a plane, I’d never had an operation before and there I was going down for a mastectomy. I was so scared of surgery, I couldn’t think about what the operation itself would involve. 

I was in hospital for four days. The oncologist said the cancer hadn’t spread anywhere else and wasn’t secondary, which was another big weight lifted. But he suggested I had chemotherapy as just one tiny rogue cell can escape and you’re better off blitzing your whole body. 

'I want to help others, that’s why I’ve got involved with Future Dreams, a breast cancer charity'

So every three weeks I went in for chemo. I felt my family was going through enough, so I had my cousins with me. I knew I had to come home afterwards, go to bed and literally stay there nearly a week, just crawling downstairs for an hour at a time. 

There were so many different pills that I had to take – steroids, two different anti-sickness pills, then pre-chemo meds as well. I’m not going to tell you it wasn’t awful because it was – bloody awful, disgusting. It was really hard on everyone. But everybody deals with it in a different way.

Josh wanted to make a fuss of me, to be around and make visitors cups of tea. Amy was the opposite. She knew her grandma had had breast cancer and then me and she was very scared, although she coped better once we established that I don’t have a mutant BRCA gene that could pass it on.

But she didn’t really want to be in the house at all. She’s very expressive and actually told me, ‘I don’t want to be around you. I don’t want to see you in bed.’ Normally, I’m always busy. 

Plus, I wasn’t a pretty sight. My hair started falling out. I bought two wigs but never wore them because I felt like I was in fancy dress. I should have shaved it off much sooner than I did. It was a control thing trying to hold on to it. 

During treatment you’re in this little bubble and I had the most amazing network of people around me. But the day it ended I just cried and cried. I walked out feeling, ‘What now?’