Mary Kelly Foy and breast cancer: 'I’m alive. I should be feeling great because it’s gone'
Mary Kelly Foy © Parliament (CC-BY 3.0)
10 min read
Labour MP Mary Kelly Foy tells Sienna Rodgers about her recovery from breast cancer, the lack of support she has felt from some quarters, and why Parliament needs to modernise
“Yeah, that looks like it’s cancer.” “Really?” “We’ll have to get it checked, obviously, but from all my experience, yeah, that’s 99.9 per cent cancer.” “Oh, right. I wasn’t expecting to hear that, lying here.”
Mary Kelly Foy, 56, had been called back for further tests after a mammogram. “Obviously, I was a little bit worried then, but I also thought it would be fine – just a little bit of fatty tissue or something,” says the Labour MP for City of Durham. She was not expecting to be told there and then that she had breast cancer.
The nurse was reassuring, telling Foy it is the best type of cancer to get and the treatment is effective. “But obviously I was in shock. She said, ‘How are you feeling?’ I just burst into tears,” Foy recalls.
Another nurse, one with misplaced gallows humour, was less sensitive. “When she was doing the X-ray, I said, ‘I’ve got cancer and I’m not sure what to do next, it’s a bit of a shock’. She went, ‘Well, don’t be booking your hospice care yet’. What a stupid thing to say! It was a joke, but I didn’t find that funny at all.”
After the mammogram in January and the follow-up tests, things moved quickly. She had three small tumours and, fortunately, the cancer was caught early, so it was curable. Her surgeon was “one of the best”, Foy says.
“They’re drawing lines on my boobs going, ‘We’ll put that there. We’ll get the MP looking great!’”
“He likes to get people diagnosed and their surgery done within three weeks of finding out. We’re all just day patients. You go in at 8.30 in the morning and you’re finished by teatime, which is great. You can get the waiting lists down that way. The care was brilliant.”
Asked whether she wanted her reconstructed breasts to be the same size as before or reduced, she answered: “Yes, I’m having a reduction, that’s brilliant!”. “My sister was with me this time. She said, ‘I wouldn’t be having a reduction now, I’d be getting mine bigger!’ It slightly kept me going, the fact I could say, ‘I’m going to get a boob job as well’.”
Did they know she was an MP? They did, Foy replies, which made for a surreal experience. “When they were doing the marks on where they were doing the surgery, it was the surgeon and another guy. I’m standing there, naked, and they’re drawing lines on my boobs going, ‘We’ll put that there. We’ll get the MP looking great!’” she says.
“Just a couple of weeks ago, I had the checkup with him to see if everything was going OK. I went in, stripped off. He walked in with the student again and went, ‘And the Right Honourable, let’s have a look how they’re doing!’”
Based on an ‘oncotype’ tumour profiling test, they concluded Foy did not need chemotherapy. She was incredibly relieved. “In the past, everybody got the chemotherapy, and lots of women didn’t necessarily need it… Mine came back as a low score.”
The MP did need 15 sessions of radiotherapy, which she did every weekday for three weeks. It was an hour’s drive each way, which made the treatment even more tiring. And by then, the general election had been called. She did door-knocking where possible but really relied on the support and understanding of her team and local party.
“I wasn’t in Parliament, so I didn’t have to worry about being slipped or the vote or anything. My whip was Mary Glindon at the time, and she was good. But I probably would have expected senior people to have said, ‘take it easy’ or ‘don’t be rushing, your health comes first’. I didn’t get any of that sort of support at all from anybody.”
Labour’s health lead Wes Streeting, who had kidney cancer in 2021, sent a supportive message, and Keir Starmer’s office sent a card. But the majority of the support came from the Women’s Parliamentary Labour Party WhatsApp group, Foy reports.
“During the election, I was actually driving to a radiotherapy session, and an MP rang up – one of the regional ones – to say, ‘Will you go down to Bishop Auckland? You need to be doing more in the neighbouring constituencies. Leave your own for now, it’ll be fine’.” Foy says the MP was aware of her diagnosis.
When the radiotherapy came to an end, she had two weeks of the campaign still to go and could not simply snap back to full health.
“I’d fall asleep in the middle of the day for no reason, not getting enough sleep at night. If you look physically OK, people think you’re cured, the cancer is gone. You’ve done your radiotherapy; you should be fine now. But it takes a toll on your body, so I wasn’t fine.”
She returned to Parliament following the election but realised it was too soon and only lasted a couple of weeks. “My heart wasn’t in it. And I should have been really ecstatic because we’d won the election and everything. I just felt really tired and no motivation to be there, and was probably making some daft decisions and being snappy with people,” Foy says frankly.
When she returned again to Westminster in September, she was still tired. And it is always a difficult time for Foy as it marks the birthday of her daughter Maria, who had severe cerebral palsy. She was Maria’s carer for all her 27 years of life.
“I always have a downer for a couple of weeks in September. Whether I’m thinking about it or not, it just happens. I get really miserable,” Foy says.
Now the MP is worried about her health going forward: the anxiety that cancer could return, of course, but also the anastrozole tablet that helps ensure it doesn’t by lowering the level of oestrogen in her body.
“It means that my menopause symptoms will be exacerbated by about three or four times,” she says. “The hot flushes, the brain fog, tiredness, and aches and pains in your joints. I think that’s the worst bit, the aches and pains in your joints. I found out that the tablet can cause osteoporosis because it’s thinning your bones as well. I had to have a density test, and that came back saying I’m at high risk of a fracture if I fall.”
“I have this survivors’ guilt about getting through it without having to have the chemotherapy”
Foy recently had a fall in Portcullis House when a vote was called. “The bell went, and I was just walking down the steps when two new MPs, two young lads from our side, ran past and it knocked me. I went down eight of the steps, head over heels.
“My staffer was with us. He just went into shock. I remember lying at the bottom of the steps. I just looked up and said, ‘Am I dead?’,” she laughs.
The first-aiders checked her out, finding her slightly concussed but fortunately she suffered no breaks.
“I wrote to the Speaker about it, told him everything that happened, and said, ‘Can you make an announcement or let MPs know just to be careful on the stairs? You don’t have to rush like that on the steps. Be careful of other people.’ I haven’t had a reply, nothing at all,” Foy notes.
She wrote in mid-September and had not received a reply by the time of our interview six weeks later, but a response arrived the following week which said the Speaker often reminds Members to be courteous in the Chamber and on the estate.
“Any little fall I get now I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to get a fracture.’That tablet I’ve got to take for five years,” she adds. “Going forward now, because I’ve got those other bits of illness, it’s not huge, but it still is the aftermath of the cancer, that my health isn’t going to be as good. I need to think about how it’s going to affect me and whether Parliament, if I need time off, how sympathetic they’re going to be.”
Foy says people assume she is “back to normal” now but she isn’t – and she is concerned about how she navigates her job at the same time as these health challenges.
“I have this survivors’ guilt about getting through it without having to have the chemotherapy,” she continues. “I’m alive. I should be feeling great because it’s gone. When I’m feeling miserable, I feel guilty about it, because there are people in a lot worse positions than I am.
“Even the inequalities around the country, in the care. I know I had a really good experience in hospital of not having to wait too long. There’ll be other places where they’re still waiting for treatment.”
She is full of praise for the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Gateshead and the Maggie’s centre, one of a network of drop-in cancer treatment centres located near NHS hospitals and run by a Scottish charity. She says it had lovely furniture and surroundings, offered financial advice and counselling to people, but also just a cuppa and a chat. It was particularly valuable when she had to make such long journeys for 15-minute radiotherapy sessions.
“It can be the best part of the year – more – for your treatment. I just felt for those women who maybe don’t have support around them, or they can’t afford it, or their work doesn’t let them take time off. Really, I do have to count my blessings.”
Foy has decided she needs to take things more slowly. After a recent experience contributing to the debate on the Employment Rights Bill, she also wants to see parliamentary procedures modernised. Like many of her new colleagues, she would like to see an end to “ridiculous” old traditions such as bobbing and waiting for hours to speak.
“I put my name down to talk, and I was second to last. I sat in the Chamber for five hours… It was awful. I needed to stand up, I needed to get something to eat, but none of that happened. When it got to my turn at the end, the [Deputy] Speaker, when I stood up to speak, having prepared the speech, said, ‘You’ve got two minutes’.
“I’m not doing that again. If it’s sitting until 10 o’clock at night, for two minutes? I’m just going to maybe do an intervention, or let the Speaker know, ‘Please don’t let me go at the end, because I have got these health issues’.”
(The House understands that an MP can wave their hand to speak if they have difficulties with bobbing, or can let the Chair know there is a problem and be moved up the list. “We use these measures regularly for people with medical concerns who might need adjustments in the Chamber,” a House of Commons spokesperson said.)
Foy is struggling to get to some meetings, even on those on the parliamentary estate: “Sometimes I’m walking, and every step is like ‘aaah’. It hurts so much.”
“When it looks as if maybe I have to take time off or leave early one night, I’ll find out then from the whips what the situation is, how sympathetic they’re going to be. Through the election, they weren’t not supportive, but there was a bit of indifference there,” she says. A whips’ office source later tells The House they let Foy know she could have as much time as she needed, and they wish her all the best in her recovery.
With Foy’s father dying in December, then the shock of cancer diagnosis and the exhausting process of treatment and recovery, the MP has had a tough year to say the least. But she is resolute: “I’m quite bubbly and I can bounce back.”
After our interview, the daughter of Irish immigrants is off to Galway for the weekend with her siblings. “I’m coming back with a tattoo.” Is she being serious? It appears so. “We’re all going to get the Celtic symbol for siblings tattooed somewhere!”
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