There is no textbook formula that can teach someone how to approach a terminal cancer diagnosis.
If there were, Liz Hatton would surely be hailed as a shining example to all of us (fighting fit included) of not just how to confront the spectre of death, but how to extract every precious moment from life.
It’s been just ten months since the 17-year-old was told she had somewhere between six months and three years to live and it’s been five weeks since she was told there could be as little as six to seven weeks left.
It’s a burdensome countdown, and one that Liz admits is an inescapable presence in her mind. Not that anyone would know it from this teenager’s remarkable composure; her determination to ensure that every single day is memorable, not just for her own mental wellbeing but for the sake of the family she loves so dearly.
In June it was taking photographs at London Fashion Week, in the summer it was Disneyland Paris, last weekend it was taking on (with the approval of her attentive medical team, of course) the stomach-churning thrills of Nemesis, the rollercoaster at Alton Towers, with friends.
The hug that made headlines around the world. Liz meeting fellow cancer sufferer the Princess of Wales
Kate and Prince William with Liz, her mum Vicky, stepdad Aaron and brother Mateo
Keen photographer Liz, in London, learning more about the craft she so loves from the Daily Mail fashion team
But of all the memories she has chalked up so far- in a bucket list that has extended beyond her own wildest imagination – perhaps the most notable was being invited to Windsor Castle to photograph an investiture, where earlier this month she found herself meeting the Prince and Princess of Wales.
Liz has a beautiful collection of photographs of the day, but the one her family will cherish is the one in which she, with little brother Mateo, eight, is sandwiched at the centre of a beaming line-up between William and Catherine and mum and stepfather, Vicky and Aaron Robayna.
As Liz and her mum Vicky, 43, are well aware, the Princess of Wales has faced her own private battle with cancer this year – diagnosed in January, as Liz was, and undergoing preventative chemotherapy – which makes the royal mother-of-three’s decision to make one of just a handful of public appearances this year to meet Liz and her family all the more poignant.
Today Liz is in London, learning more about the craft she so loves from the Daily Mail fashion team, when we meet in Kensington’s Royal Garden Hotel, which overlooks Kensington Palace. Liz, still glowing with the thrill of her royal encounter, would far rather talk about Kate, their shared passion for photography – or the ‘out of this world’ lemon drizzle cake the royal kitchen served up, just for her – than what she is going through.
‘We didn’t discuss anything about cancer or treatment,’ she is quick to say. ‘But I definitely had a lot of empathy for all the struggles the princess has gone through this year because she not only had to go through the treatment of an awful disease but she has had to do so in the public eye, and not all the public have been kind about how she has gone about her treatment.
‘Personally I just want people to know she is so, so kind and lovely and genuine and I think it’s only fair she deals with her own illness in her own way, because I can say first-hand that cancer is a struggle; it’s the biggest struggle I have ever faced and ever will face and I can probably say it’s up there as one of her biggest struggles.’
Never did Liz, or Vicky, who is talking to the Mail with her daughter, imagine they would be able to empathise quite so painfully.
This time last year, Liz was living the fairly typical life of a hardworking student at Harrogate Grammar School. She’d scooped a stellar collection of GCSEs – all eights and nines – and was beginning her first year of A-Levels in English Literature, Spanish, psychology, and photography.
Photography has been Liz’s passion since she saved up to buy her first camera aged ten, but with a wise head on young shoulders she knew she needed a university degree to provide a cushion to achieving her dreams.
Liz and Mateo on an Iceland cruise in 2022, before her devastating cancer diagnosis
A Disney dream come true for the whole family who travelled to Paris to see Mickey and friends
When she first began to experience pain in her shoulder last autumn, the slender teen put it down to lugging a heavy bag around each day.
Then, when she began to complain about feeling bloated in December, Vicky, a specialist autism teacher, was initially concerned for her daughter’s mental well-being.
‘I was worried about anorexia to be honest, she’d lost so much weight over the summer with her GCSEs – she was anxious and wanted to do well – that I said you’re just putting a little weight back on.’
Liz had already made herself a GP appointment when suddenly on a weekend in early January, the symptoms that had been bubbling escalated with devastating speed: within a couple of days, the bloating became a very visible swelling, a painful period had ended, but the acute pain had not.
‘It just didn’t make sense,’ says Liz. ‘Am I still on my period, am I not? It was excruciating, I didn’t sleep for the entire night.’
So, after a Saturday morning phone call to 111, Liz found herself at a hospital walk-in centre, being told she might have an ovarian cyst and to see her GP on Monday to arrange a scan.
And then came the Sunday.
‘She was in so much pain, it was ridiculous,’ says Vicky. ‘So we went to A&E.’ At midnight, after a barrage of tests and scans, the family were told medics could see masses in Liz’s ovaries and liver.
‘We didn’t know at that point it was cancer, but we were speaking to a gynaecologist, and I could kind of tell by her eyes, this is not good news,’ says Vicky, whose composure matches her daughter’s, largely because Liz has insisted they have tackled everything that has come since without tears.
The follow-up appointment was supposed to be on the Wednesday, but in the end it was on the following day that Vicky took the call that changed all their lives. ‘They couldn’t identify what kind it was, but it was unequivocally cancer,’ she says.
Given that the only time off school her daughter had ever taken for sickness was a bout of chickenpox, aged seven, at first Vicky was confident, focused on the 85 per cent of children who survive cancer for five years or more. She didn’t contemplate her daughter might not be one of them.
Liz’s response, meanwhile, was typically diligent.
‘The first thing I did was email every single one of my teachers, apologising for the fact that I had cancer, so I wouldn’t be in school for a little while.’
Three days later, having been admitted to Leeds General Infirmary, they learned it was a sarcoma, an aggressive desmoplastic small round cell tumour that usually occurs in the abdomen and pelvis, a cancer so very rare that there are only around 12 cases (the majority of which are in men) a year in the UK.
Liz’s initial response to the name for her condition was a blunt question to doctors, along the lines of ‘am I f*****?’ Immediately followed by ‘sorry Mum’.
‘No,’ came the response. ‘You’re young, you’re strong, but it does mean you have got a real fight on your hands.’
They swiftly learned that the hospital had never dealt with a case before; also that only 15 per cent of sufferers survived beyond five years.
‘Even at 15 per cent, I was like, she’s never been off school ill, she’s got an amazing immune system, she has a good chance,’ says Vicky.
Stepfather Aaron, a scientist (she is also still close to her dad and two younger sisters from his second marriage) was more cautious and once it became clear exactly how rare the cancer was and how far it had spread, they all knew her chances of survival were minimal.
Liz, whose blemish-free skin and new growth of blonde hair makes her look ethereal, much prefers photography to maths, but her life these last ten months has been dominated by figures.
Sixteen when diagnosed, treated on a children’s ward, but effectively an adult in terms of NHS information flow, she was never shielded from the statistics.
Disarmingly frank she says: ‘I just hadn’t clicked that I could be a percentage, because up until the point of having a disease, you don’t really think about deaths as percentages, do you?’
The drugs regime is another array of figures with more than 50 pills a day.
There’s one set at 2am, more at 7.30am and again, like clockwork through the day. Liz shows me them. ‘This is anti-sickness, this one’s for nerve pain, these are for pain, that’s another anti-sickness, this one is an anti-depressant, this is to stop my periods…
‘I mean, I don’t want a period as well as cancer,’ she chuckles.
Pain is constant, at one point she has to tell me she’s not sleeping but has shut her eyes because it hurts to hold them open.
She gestures to put my hands on her abdomen so I can feel the taut mass that bothers her most, and that has reduced her appetite to a few nibbles because eating makes her feel so terribly sick. ‘I describe it as sort of being like gouged out by a spoon,’ she says.
Then there are the ten rounds of chemotherapy she’s endured; halted in September, when Liz’s cancer stopped responding.
‘It had reached the point where it just wasn’t working and the tumours were growing despite all of the chemicals that were being put into my body. I had the option of continuing with some different types of chemo or stopping the treatment,’ she says.
She chose to stop, preferring to spend time with her family and ‘enjoy what time I have left, instead of spending it stuck in hospital and feeling even more terrible and ill with side-effects’.
Although now, she admits she’s thinking again, for the sake of little brother Mateo. He is, says Vicky, the one subject that Liz finds most difficult to talk about.
The bucket list that she is having so much fun ticking off came about as a distraction – because tough as Liz is, she’s been terribly low (hence the anti-depressant she shows me).
‘There have been periods of time where I just didn’t want to speak to anyone at all; there were weeks and weeks where I just avoided my phone, I turned everything on silent.
‘It felt kind of surreal for a while, to the point where I was dealing with it by not really believing it,’ she says
The bucket list, however, gave her something she wanted to talk about with friends, who have all been ‘really, really good’.
At first she was sceptical about her mum’s plan. As Vicky says: ‘Liz said: “I don’t know why you’re making it? No-one’s going to respond anyway.” And I was like, “well, even if I get one person to respond, then that’s a win.”’
Liz and Mateo in Disneyland for a trip doctors weren’t sure she was strong enough to make
With Mum Vicky, Liz joined the Daily Mail fashion team at their photographic studio in London
Vicky’s broad smile stretches even further when she talks about the size of the response. Rob Brydon invited Liz to watch filming of Would I Lie To You, then there was fashion week, and of course, Windsor Castle.
They couldn’t get medical insurance to travel to the US to meet one of Liz’s photographic idols but threw caution to the wind to travel to Disneyland Paris. Their medical team also provided a letter to ensure Liz could ride Nemesis last weekend, a trip that did involve some telephone support for ‘rollercoaster-induced tumour pain’.
‘My tumours were not a fan of me for making them endure a ride, but I’m not a fan of them,’ jokes Liz, again.
The invitations are still piling up.
‘I would recommend anyone in that position doing the same kind of thing, you know, make a list of things you want to do, and do them,’ says Vicky.
‘I just think about the next thing we have planned. That’s what we did to survive chemo and that’s what we are doing now.’
She doesn’t sugar coat how hard it is – on the day she was planning Liz’s visit to the Mail’s photographic studios, she was also taking delivery of oxygen and end-of-life medications, ‘for when we need it’.
She admits, with the only wobble during a day I spend in her company: ‘There are times I cry, but you force yourself to pull yourself together, because if you cry now it’s waste of the time you have got together.’
Liz, who interviewed for and landed the role of deputy head girl, despite not returning to lessons since diagnosis, isn’t wasting a moment either.
She’s decided that whenever that time comes, she wants her body to go to medical research – in Scotland, because she’s not old enough to donate it in England, and Glasgow, not Dundee, because she likes the sound of the place.
‘I don’t think I’m quite on my death bed yet,’ she quips. ‘I’m not scared to die, but I’m scared of running out of time to say my goodbyes and things like that.’
Vicky is bursting with pride as her daughter winces and gets to her feet, raising her camera with a quiet composure to capture more moments to savour.