Having cancer changes everything; and when one of your closest friends dies from cancer, the world changes again, says Lauren Mahon. For Mahon, who co-presented the podcast You, Me and the Big C with Rachael Bland, her own cancer diagnosis had inspired the desire to find love. Now, her colleague’s death has given the quest a new urgency.
Mahon sounds focused and warm when we meet, a tall order just days after Bland’s death, and despite what she describes as the “tornado” of TV and radio interviews since last week. But that is absolutely in the spirit of the conversation-changing programme the women created along with the podcast’s third presenter, Deborah James.
Mahon only met Bland and James for the first time in March, when they recorded the opening episode of the podcast: in the six months since the three women – all current or former cancer sufferers – have sought to change society’s approach to the disease, and how we think about it, talk about it and act around it. They have tackled subjects such as money, children, work and doctors through the prism of their own experiences, in an entirely honest and sometimes raucous way.
One of the most recent episodes was on intimacy and dating; and that is apposite, given that Mahon is currently appearing on First Dates Hotel on Channel 4. Having cancer, she says, has totally changed her perspective on dating. “Before I got ill I was a very ‘legs open, heart closed’ kind of girl. I’m not saying I was promiscuous, but I would take someone home, have a couple of nights with them and then never speak to them again.
“I was having a lot of fun but not letting anyone into my heart. But when I got cancer, I said to the doctor, ‘I don’t want to die – I want to get married, I want to have children’ … I realised I wanted to take my love life more seriously.”
