When Donia Youssef found herself feeling low on energy, she put it down to the fact she was raising two small girls and running a demanding business. But when she couldn’t shake tiredness and began to rapidly lose weight, she began to worry something else was wrong.
“I went to the doctor, and I said I feel shattered all the time. And they said, ‘It’s because you're doing a lot. Slow down’,” the 46-year-old says, recalling the beginning of her gruelling health battle in 2017. “We did a full blood test. But the test came back fine with no issues.”
After a second round of blood tests revealed no apparent health problems, Donia set about introducing more exercise into her routine in the hope that this would boost her overall energy levels. But after six months of feeling drained, she rolled over in bed one morning to feel a painful lump pressing against her under arm. “I thought I had fallen over. There was this golf ball-sized lump under my armpit, which I’d never felt before,” she recalls. “I called my dad, who's a doctor, and he said, ‘Can you feel anything if you check your breasts?’ And I couldn’t. It was just a hardness under my arm. He said go to the GP anyway, and it was when I was there that they became concerned.”
Donia was given a biopsy which determined she had breast cancer – a diagnosis that the mother-of-two had prepared herself for in the time between the test and receiving the result. Acknowledging that medical experts would advise against Googling symptoms, the talent manager admits that she had excessively researched what she thought her lump could signify and so felt “relief” when she was told she had stage two breast cancer. She was prepared to fight the disease. Unfortunately, further testing found the cancer had spread to her lymph nodes.
She then endured brutal rounds of chemotherapy that destroyed her immune system so severely that she was hospitalised with sepsis and suffered heart failure. The cancer left her at greater risk of ovarian cancer, so, following a double mastectomy, Donia also endured a hysterectomy. She then faced early colon cancer diagnosis in 2022 and contracted skin cancer in 2023 which required chemo treatment.
While the experience would leave many feeling overwhelmed, and Donia admits there were days where she would cry and times when her body was in so much pain that she didn’t think she would survive, she has remained incredibly hopeful and wants to take the knowledge she has learned on her journey to help others. Being a mum of two young girls, Aaliyah and Tiana who are now 12 and nine, she wrote a book series titled The Monster In Mummy which other parents have used as a valuable tool to explain cancer to their little ones while battling the disease themselves. And she has also established The Triple C Community. Set up to establish a ‘Cancer Care Community’, Donia and her team hope to raise awareness and education about cancer and the treatments available – and also raise funds through the organisation to donate to cancer charities, and provide links and advice to others to gain help on everything from finding financial assistance to gaining access to mental health support while fighting cancer.
“The hope is to find a cure,” Donia, who lives in Essex with her partner Thomas and their family, enthuses. “We have a lot of initiatives and workshops to help others. We are working with business partners to improve cancer research. We run events and raise money for charities. My hope is for this to be my legacy and to give hope to others.”
After being let down by initial blood tests which completely failed to find the cancer growing inside her body for the six months between her initial trip to the doctor and the discovery of the golf-ball-sized lump, Donia says trusting her instincts and getting as much medical advice as possible is key. “Be persistent and absolutely get a second opinion,” she says. “The biggest thing I can advise is to go private if you can. I would probably have passed with colon cancer if I didn't have it. They have a lot of services and tests on offer that the NHS do not have. I can't rate private health care highly enough.”
She continues, “With all my conditions, I pay obviously an extreme, but, you know, it's your life. It's 100% worth it. I got skin cancer last December, and that was picked up privately. Everything that I've caught at early stages has been via private healthcare. Sacrifice your night out, or 100 pounds a month. 100% do it.”
Donia has another five years of testing and scans ahead before doctors will be able to give her an ‘all clear’ and she is also facing five more years of oral chemo, taken in pill form, to prevent the disease spreading to her bones. Donia was put into early menopause when she was just 40, after having a hysterectomy as preventative surgery as she has the BRCA2 gene which makes her more susceptible to other cancers including Ovarian and Pancreatic cancer and she also has osteopenia as a result of all the medication she has taken – but she found helplines were a reassuring resource to help lift her spirits and answer any questions along the way.
She also recommends ignoring warnings about Google – and to take the advice of non-medically trained friends with a pinch of salt. “They say, ‘Don't go on Google, because it scares,’ but actually, Google has helped me prepare a lot,” she insists. “People give their opinions about, you know, ‘Eat this. Don't eat that.’ But I’ve got friends who are vegans who ate healthily all their life who still got cancer. You can’t be complacent. Listen to your body.”
For more information about Donia’s organisation, The Triple C Cancer Care Community, visit thetriplec.co.uk.
