There’s a big cancer-related fraud that’s making headlines in Australia right now, with a woman called Belle Gibson who blogged about curing cancer via eating well (have a look here if you don’t know what I’m talking about), and it’s created quite a lot of controversy. All the media outlets which helped her pedal her complex web of lies and deceit, by accepting her wildly outrageous claims without any effort whatsoever to check even the most basic of facts, are now whipping up a frenzy of ‘how dare she’ headlines. Meanwhile, the Australian Women’s Weekly magazine is publishing an interview with this woman, where she very clearly demonstrates that she has not one iota of insight into her own behaviour or its impact on vulnerable people. Again, she is being enabled by the media to trot out tales of her twisted reality, supported by retouched images of her which one can only assume are to make us wonder how such a young and attractive woman could behave in such a wicked way.

The media has built Belle Gibson, and now they are knocking her down. The lies and deceit are all her own, but thus far it appears that not once did any of the media outlets who were telling (and selling) her story, was she questioned about the validity of her claims. Much of what she said was farcical or facile or both, yet her fame grew, her followers amassed, and her power grew. It’s the power she was given, by every journalist who gushingly accepted the information provided to them by her PR company, and editor who overlooked the outrageousness of the claims, that has enabled sick, vulnerable and misguided people to be hurt.

Cancer, in reality, is not attractive. Tumours are ugly, whether seen or unseen. They can cause your breasts to be cut off, you anus to be sewn up, or half the skin on your face to be replaced by a flap of tissue from your belly. They make your organs stop working, which makes you thin, or fat, or sallow or grey. The treatment – and by this I mean surgery and chemotherapy and radiation and stem cell transplants and hormonal therapy – is uglier still. It poisons your cells, makes your hair fall out, gives your diarrhoea or maybe makes you vomit diarrhea out your mouth, causes unmitigating bone and nerve pain, headaches, sensitivity to cold, sensitivity to heat, burns you, makes you barren, brings you to your knees and then takes them out from under you.

All this ugliness is not really what the media wants to hear about. That it’s the truth of cancer and how cancer is best treated, is irrelevant. That cancer makes you look sick, and that the treatment makes you look even sicker before it can begin to make you look better, is not going to make the front cover of a glossy magazine. Tubby, one-breasted 45-year-old women with burn scars and post-menopausal slack skin don’t become media darlings, with thousands of followers hanging off every word – I find it best to eat my porridge at 10am, because that’s when the reflux meds kick in and I can risk eating without revisiting my breakfast for the remainder of the day – is not the sort of morning mantra that’s going to cut it with the Instagram devotees, when much of society seems obsessed with beauty and youth and demands, absolutely demands, simple answers to really fucking complicated questions. As abhorrent as Belle Gibson’s behaviour has been,  rather than questioning why she did what she did, I think we need to question how she was able to get away with it in the first place.

1969 was a massive year in human history, as on July 20 Neil Armstrong became the first person to set foot on the moon, uttering the immortal words ‘That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind’. My mother was 35 weeks pregnant with me at the time, and I imagine she was taking lots of small steps, most of them in the direction of the toilet, as she suffered with something called hyperemesis gravidarum (constant, untreatable nausea, vomiting and dehydration) throughout the entire pregnancy. She was still vomiting in the car on the way to the hospital, madly driven by my aunt through red lights because I was Mum’s third baby and she’d decided to stay at home until serious labour started, which turned out to be a bit difficult to judge with any accuracy. I was born less than an hour after she arrived at the maternity ward, whereupon the vomiting stopped and I imagine my mother lit up one of her customary cigarettes and mentally high-fived herself for giving birth to a nine pound baby despite having eaten nothing except lemons and aniseed balls for the preceding 40 weeks.

Mum and Dad only ever intended to have two kids (well to be perfectly frank I think both of those were accidents too but let’s not get too caught up in details), but when my brothers were 10 and 9, she went to the doctor because she felt so crap, and said to the doctor that if she didn’t know any better, she’d say she was pregnant [insert my mother’s high-pitched nervous laugh here]. The good doctor decided that it would be best to check, so blood was taken and sent away (no peeing on a magic stick back in ’69) and lo and behold, a couple of weeks later my mother found out that she was indeed pregnant with what my grandmother always referred to as the family’s ‘afterthought’. Because I was the precious youngest grandchild, feted and fawned over by my brothers and cousins, I always felt that being the ‘afterthought’ was pretty special, and so wore the title with flamboyant pride. You could take your eldests, your middles, your twins and your favourites; I was the afterthought, and nothing short of another accidental pregnancy whilst using contraception could take that away from me. And fortunately for me, and my mother, I remained the only afterthought of that generation.

I think my status as the much-loved afterthought has played a significant part in me having what can only be described as excellent self-esteem. I’m now 45, one-breasted, greying, with thunder thighs and reflux, but now, perhaps more than ever, I can see very clearly what I have to offer the world. I love to talk, and I love to write, and I love to do both about myself. So over the coming four weeks, I have three breast cancer-related public speaking gigs and a sponsored post for the Cancer Council. I’ll be talking and writing about how cancer has affected my life, how sometimes adversity breeds a little bit of beauty in amongst all the darkness, and how it’s the little steps, taken every day by researchers, that will enable us to make the giant leap towards finding a cure for cancer.

If you are interested in the events I’m speaking at, you can find more information here about the Mother’s Day Classic Walk/Run (they’re being held all over Australia so get your arse out of bed and your feet on the pavement on May 10) and here about the I Believe in Pink High Tea (which is being held in Toowoomba on May 9). I am also going to be walking (slowly, and probably puffing a bit on the hills) in the Mother’s Day Classic, so if you would like to sponsor me (all donations go directly to cancer research), you can find my sponsorship page here. I’m also going to be writing soon about the work of the Cancer Council, so stay tuned.

Here’s me doing a happy dance in anticipation of your support. Dance monkey, dance.