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was beginning to wonder if I could trust any doctors at all when all the time they’d been saying I was okay when I actually had cancer. As the machine went whirring round, I thought: ‘This was supposed to be just bad periods. What on earth am I doing here?’

      It felt as though I was being buried alive in there. There was a plastic mask that came right down close to my face and I had to lie very still. I’m such a fidget, that was really hard to do. And I was all on my own inside that machine. No one could hold my hand or whisper nice things to me. I wouldn’t have been able to hear over the noise.

      I just started thinking about stuff. Cancer is so serious…This is happening to me…Why me?…I’m glad it was Jack that came with me…I’m scared of what they are going to find.

      It was pretty weird but it seemed that Jack and I were a couple again. We’d been through good times and bad. Very bad. But it said a lot that he was the one I wanted by my side when I had a scan for cancer. That’s when you know who really matters in your life.

      After the scan, a woman doctor told me it looked as though just the neck of the womb was affected. I know it sounds silly but it always makes me feel weird when they talk about a ‘neck’ down there. Where’s the head then?

      The doctor said: ‘We can just cut it away and you may need some radiotherapy and chemo.’

      I thought to myself: ‘Oh crap.’ I knew that chemotherapy was the one that made you lose your hair and throw up a lot, and radiotherapy sounded like radiation from a nuclear accident, the kind that makes you have three-headed babies.

      Then she told me there was still hope so it wasn’t that bad.

      I was just confused about all the different messages I was getting. The main thing I wanted people to answer me was: ‘Was I going to be okay?’ Please, God, yes. But no one was saying one way or the other.

      As soon as we left Harlow Hospital we had to head up to London. Max Clifford, who has been my publicist for some time now, was well concerned about the whole thing and had made me an appointment with a private Harley Street doctor, Dr Ann Coxon. He said he’d pay for a private scan. I couldn’t speak, I was so grateful. What a good man he was for doing that! If he’d been there I’d have hugged him.

      One of my good friends Charlene met Jack and me for the appointment. I’ve known Charlene for years, since we grew up near each other in Bermondsey. We made our way to the swanky Harley Street address I’d been told and were shown in to the doctor’s office, where Dr Coxon explained what was going to happen.

      She wanted me to have another scan but this would be different from the Harlow one because I had to have an injection beforehand and she told me I had to breathe in and out several times. This scan would show loads of new angles and bits of my body I never knew I had! It was much more detailed than the one in Harlow. Jack wasn’t allowed in this time. He and Charlene sat outside in the posh waiting room looking through the magazines.

      Because I’d just had a scan done the day before, I didn’t feel so scared–just a bit confused because it was different to the last one. I followed all the instructions and while I was inside the scanner I tried to think about nice things to take my mind off it all. I thought about the boys when they were babies, and all the cute things they had said and done when they were toddlers, and I thought about how much I was looking forward to seeing them in a couple of days’ time.

      At last it was over, but Dr Coxon said I’d have to come back the next day for the results, so Jack and I piled into the car and went home.

      I’m not much of a reader usually, but a couple of people had hinted to me that there were some horrible things written about me on the internet. That evening I went to look them up and was really upset at what I found:

       ‘Can’t believe Jade Goody is talking about having cancer when it’s just a few abnormal cells. Loads of people get that.’

      ‘I have no sympathy with Jade Goody. It’s like karma. She said all those horrible racist things to Shilpa Shetty and then she got cancer…’

       ‘Jade is exaggerating and lying about this cancer and I think she should be ashamed…’

      What kind of sicko would make up a story that they had cancer? That’s something I’d never dream of doing. Some people are sick in the head. I’ve read some rubbish written about me over the years but this took the biscuit.

      Call me a racist, a bigot, a chav, whatever–but don’t call me a liar, especially not over this.

      I’ve said sorry so many times over the Shilpa Shetty incident. And I really mean it. I wish I could go back and do things differently but I can’t, and that’s that.

      Just thinking about me on that film makes me feel ill. But how could people say I deserve this killer disease because of some mistakes I made two years ago? That really is a nasty thing to say to anyone.

      Some internet bloggers were asking why I had suddenly had a medical test just before I headed off to India if I didn’t want to make some publicity thing out of it. Well, I’d been having those tests for years and years. I’d had my first smear aged sixteen, after which I had laser treatment to remove abnormal cells. Then a second one at eighteen and more laser treatment. At twenty-two I was pregnant with Bobby, then I had Freddy and after that my smears were normal. I had a miscarriage with Jack’s baby in June 2007 and had an abnormal smear then but doctors didn’t seem worried about it. Test after test said there was no cancer.

      Nothing seemed to need doing.

      Within months after the miscarriage I was admitted to hospital with agonising pains. They gave me an ultrasound and said that was normal.

      The horrible pain and awful heavy bleeding kept coming back over the next few months and I kept going back trying to find answers but I was hitting a brick wall.

      One doctor even said to me: ‘You’re an attention-seeking hysteric and wouldn’t know a normal period even if it hit you.’

      I felt awful. They thought I was making things up. I didn’t think I was a hypo-whatever-it’s-called, but if a doctor tells you you are then you believe him. Maybe these were just normal periods I was having? Maybe I had a low pain threshold? How could I be ill when every medical person I saw said I wasn’t?

      So I just took the hospital doctors’ decisions on faith. I’d had lots of tests and then I had another dose of laser treatment in August 2007 but they’d said it was fine for me to go to India.

      If I’d known the news, I’d never have gone. As a mum, my health is too important. I hope all those people who doubted me are ashamed of themselves.

      It was one of the tests I’d had on that last visit that came out positive. No one else had picked this up.

      Reading the internet stuff that night was devastating. Obviously there were lots of members of the public who still hated me over the Shilpa thing. It was horrible and upsetting on top of all the rest of the bad news I was getting.

      I just curled up in a ball. I wanted to shut out the world. I didn’t answer the phone, and when Jack asked me what I wanted for dinner I said I wasn’t hungry. I had such a huge lump in my throat I couldn’t have swallowed a single thing.

      22nd August 2008

      Jack came with me the next day to get the results of the scan, and I was really glad he had because it was devastating.

      When I got to the Royal Marsden Hospital, the famous cancer hospital in London, I had a meeting with a surgeon called Dr Tom Ind. He seemed like a straight kind of man. I’m getting used to meeting all these posh doctors now.

      He said to me: ‘I work one on one with my patients. I give them all the information and tell them the truth upfront about what’s going on. If you don’t want this, I can refer you to someone else who works differently.’

      I

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