Strictly Come Dancing Professional Amy Dowden has revealed how she came close to death during her current battle with breast cancer.
The 33-year-old announced in June that she had undergone a mastectomy after discovering she had stage three breast cancer just weeks before.
Dowden 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 husband Ben Jones, 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!
She is currently undergoing chemotherapy treatment and in a recent interview with The Mirror revealed just how tough the last few months have been.
Amy Dowden came close to death during chemotherapy treatment
Dowden, who hails from Caerphilly in south Wales, explained her chemotherapy treatment has involved everything from emergency hospital stays and life-threatening complications to the “hardest step so far” - shaving her hair off.
She has just undergone her fifth cycle of chemo having to undergo one every other week.
Her first and second cycles of chemotherapy were the hardest, developing sepsis, blood clots and the Welsh professional dancer revealed she very nearly died.
Dowden, speaking to The Mirror, said: "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 continued to explain that following her first lot of chemo she “felt great”, going for a five-mile walk with her dad two days later.
But soon after she collapsed and was rushed to hospital.
Dowden recounted: "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.”
“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.
“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.”
But Dowden wasn't out of the woods yet, pressing ahead with her second cycle of chemo she would be faced with more terrifying circumstances.
“I got blood clots, I ended up back in hospital,” she explained.
“I had the chemo on the Thursday and ended up in hospital on the Monday until the Wednesday.
“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.”
The 33-year-old Welsh dancer nearly didn't undergo chemo, initially refusing it.
She said: "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, but it was her former dance teacher in Wales who eventually convinced her.
Dowden isn't taking part in Strictly Come Dancing 2023 due to her battle with cancer.
But is hoping to finish chemo early next month and then is hoping to return to the dance floor for next year's season.
She added: "I dream every night of being back on the dance floor.
“But I don’t want to set myself up for disappointment.”
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