A Woman in Twelve What Happened Next?

In 1996, BBC Northern Ireland broadcast A Woman In Twelve.

It told the story of Deirdre Kee,

who faced a diagnosis of breast cancer.

Long time, no see.

I asked you last week if you would consider doing a double mastectomy,

and I'm more convinced of that today than I was back then.

Deirdre had both breasts removed,

but the cancer came back

and viewers watched Deirdre cope with the devastating results.

Deirdre's programmes, very much

brought cancer and cancer treatment

a step further into the public consciousness.

People said, I know what I'm going to have here,

because I've seen what happened to Deirdre Kee.

It' just to...

drop this down... actually, I'm comfortable dropping it all down,

if you people are.

She obviously had a really good relationship with the camera crew,

but to actually expose and show the scarring -

I thought that was quite brave to do that.

She really felt herself a partner in this programme,

not just a contributor.

Deirdre Kee continued filming with the BBC for a second programme,

right up until her death in 1998.

If Deirdre were diagnosed nowadays,

the chance of doing well would be higher.

She might still be someone who would die of her disease,

but the chance of doing well would clearly be better.

Now we revisit both these programmes,

speak to those who took part in them to find out,

when the cameras left, what happened next.

Those of you who know me will not be the least bit surprised that

I should speak at my own funeral,

but someone much wiser than I once said

that if you want a job done properly, you should do-it-yourself.

And besides, it gives me the opportunity to have the last word.

For those of you who are exercising constraint

and keeping a stiff upper lip in the mistaken belief that

I wouldn't want you to cry, then please cut it out and let it rip.

But the tears are not to be tears of sadness,

but rather they should be tears of joy and celebration.

In the summer of 1995,

Deirdre Kee - a part-time teacher in her early 40s -

contacted the BBC.

She was about to undergo treatment for breast cancer,

and offered to let a director film her experience.

It was a brave, bold and generous offer,

typical of Deirdre.

My head very clearly says what needs to be done

and I'm practical and sensible

and, you know, deal with things that need to be done,

in a very methodical manner

and so my head has very clearly got the message.

Her youngest sister, Brona, who took part in the filming, no longer

lives in Belfast, but 3,000 miles away in Oman,

in the Middle East.

So this is the rooftop.

When we do have visitors, we tend to bring our sunbeds up here

and umbrellas and a few plants to make it a little bit more

exotic... tropical!

As you can see we have the mountain range

here at the back, which is the beauty of Oman.

You get a bit of both.

If you look over there, we have the sea view, which is lovely,

and that's the beach that we would go down to and utilise.

I was around for a lot of the filming,

and you see a lot of shots of me in the background.

This was 15 years ago and reality TV was not, sort of, the in-thing.

So for her to do what she did

was fairly groundbreaking, I think.

It's not a very good quality one.

'87-ish, because I was in London

and Deirdre was in Laceys -

the restaurant she owned.

When I was growing up, Deirdre had left.

She went to college, and then she went off to the States.

I went to visit her when I was 15.

I didn't know her that well,

so we spent a summer together in the States, which was lovely,

and then, when she came back, she opened the Harvey restaurant.

She worked there as manager, and I went in as a member of staff,

so we worked closely then. Our relationship developed from there.

She was very supportive of me, of anything I wanted to do.

I started up the aerobic business,

and she came to all the classes,

regardless of whether she was the only one in the class.

-What's your date of birth, please?

-2-5-54.

-Do you have any religious denomination?

-No.

-Marital status?

-Single.

The really unusual thing about Deirdre Kee

was that she came to us,

and that virtually never happens

with key contributors for programmes.

That was just the beginning of what turned out to be two programmes

over the course of more than two years, which were,

in many ways, among the easiest programmes I ever made.

And it was partly because Deirdre was such a willing contributor.

The decision I made last week still stands.

So you want to go ahead and have the mastectomy operation tomorrow?

That's right.

Deirdre was very much into the media most of her adult life.

She taught media in college and she was very fascinated by it,

so it was a natural progression for her to do that.

Bilateral mastectomy just means

-removing both breasts, either side...

-That's right.

..and that's today's date.

She was a very assertive person. There's no doubt about that.

And highly opinionated.

She knew what she wanted, she knew what she wanted to say,

the message she wanted to get across.

I would be a fool to even try to bluff my way on this one.

In my very weak moments,

like anyone who's vulnerable, yes, I am afraid.

I'm afraid of what it's going to do to me,

and I'm not talking about the physical, cosmetic imagery stuff.

I'm not talking about that.

This is one of those life-changing experiences

and I'm aware of it and I have absolute trust that

whichever way it goes and however I change,

the changes will all be appropriate

and I'll be a better person for it.

I think what she wanted to do initially, was to see if a programme

could be made that followed her through her cancer treatment

and to show people that this wasn't really anything

to be too frightened about.

That if you took the right attitude,

and you lived the right kind of lifestyle,

that you could beat this.

And I think that's what her original motivation was.

Can I see my size 38 A bra, please?

-I can't believe this, Dee.

-No, I mean...

It's like the fisherman, you know... a likely tale!

I was this big!

There was a scene in the first programme,

where she was sat on the bed with a mastectomy bra,

and having a laugh with male and female friends who were

visiting at the time, and that's how she dealt with it.

She turned it around, she addressed it and saw the funny side of it.

I always thought Jane Fonda looked very painful, up there.

She always looked... you know, you can probably tell

because they're too perfect.

Why are we getting into this?

We've discussed in general, that chemotherapy is an appropriate

thing to consider in someone in your age group.

-OK.

-OK?

The pattern of chemotherapy I would suggest, is giving you

a combination of two particular drugs.

Quite often, the biggest concern they have

is that they might lose their hair.

The type of chemotherapy Deirdre had,

she was virtually certain to lose her hair

and we told her about that before she started chemotherapy.

She knew in her head that was coming.

It's still a terrible blow when it happens.

It's feeling sticky and tight

and a nuisance,

and so today, I've decided I'm going to wash it.

She rang me up and said,

"We're at the stage now where my hair is

"going to fall out soon."

It was a Sunday and I didn't have a crew available,

and I just said to her, "Don't wash your hair.

"Don't wash your hair for a day or two, until I can get a crew."

And she said, "That's fine."

TREMBLING SIGH

She had a very small bathroom, and the cameraman had to set

up his camera in the bath, and we rehearsed the way she'd do it,

but, you know, you sometimes need to do that to get things properly,

and you know, in the end, that sequence was very, very powerful.

SNIFFING BACK TEARS

It's actually

a better shape than I thought it was going to be.

It's still hard to...

Oh, yeah, it's flaky.

This is where the department store or the organisation of the company...

The documentary followed Deirdre's treatment

and her return to work for several more months.

Broadcast in December 1986, the programme ended on a note of hope.

I feel great up here.

I know I look great, you know.

There's no real damage done.

So we'll give that some thought. But as I said, it's in the future,

so I don't want to think about it at the moment.

Right now it's Christmas, it's my favourite time of the year.

I want to think about getting ready for Christmas and enjoying it

and looking forward to 1997.

Reaction to the programme was universally positive.

Individual viewers, cancer charities

and the press all praised Deirdre Kee's immense courage.

One television reviewer wrote,

"She wasn't so much a Woman In Twelve as a woman in a million.

A lot of people were uplifted by seeing how Deirdre coped

with her illness. A lot of people came to me, saying,

"I know about chemotherapy, I've seen that programme."

A lot said, "I know a bit about you, I've seen you in that programme."

And that's also quite often reassuring for patients.

People believe that if you're on television, you must be good.

That programme was nominated

for a Royal Television Society documentary award,

a national award.

And we went over to London, Deidre and I,

and a couple of other people who were involved in the production,

and all the way through the evening as it was building up

to the presentation of that award, and we were just nominated,

Deidre just kept saying, you know, "What are you worried about, Bruce?

"We're going to win this. We're going to win this."

I said, "Well, there are other good programmes here too."

"I'm telling you, there's absolutely no doubt we're going to..."

And that's just the way she was. And of course, we did.

And she said, "I told you."

Deidre Kee was now more and more in the public eye.

She was named Wonder Woman Of The Year,

and relished her prize at a health farm.

Good health seemed assured.

For me, it's really just all about R and R, resting and relaxing.

Focusing on yourself and taking care of yourself.

We kept in touch.

I saw her from time to time, and she was doing really well.

And then she just got in touch one day and said, "It's back."

We thought, "Let's just carry on filming and see what happens."

The first programme was very much a practical journey.

She stepped up to the plate and she knew she had to deal with something

and she dealt with it, and that was obvious in the first programme.

INSTRUCTOR: Step right. Both arms down.

The second programme moved through to the spiritual journey

that she probably didn't realise that she was going to embark on.

-It was just the way it happened.

-INSTRUCTOR: Right hand down.

One of the key sequences in programme two

was when Deirdre had to visit the hospital for a further consultation

with Seamus McAleer.

Oh, my goodness...

We were made fairly aware in advance

that Deirdre was going to be getting some pretty difficult news that day.

How are you keeping?

Well... Just hurry up, Seamus.

She said, "Look, when I get the scan, I want you to talk to me about the result on TV."

And I said to her, "You know, we could do it twice.

"Tell you for real, and then tell you later on TV for the cameras."

And she said, "No. I want the real thing."

You had the MRI of liver done.

I have spoken with Dr Foster,

and he is quite certain that there's been a change in the liver,

that there's some disease present in the liver.

-OK.

-SHE EXHALES HEAVILY

Now, it's not a great deal of change overall.

In other words, it'll act like normal liver there.

But you have areas is in the liver that do represent a spread

of breast disease.

I'm disappointed to be telling you that. I know you are...

'This is one of those moments

'that I'll never forget till my dying day.'

Even now just talking about it,

I can feel a shiver going down my spine.

To be in a consulting room

at the moment when a patient is largely being told

there's nothing more that can be done for them...

SEAMUS: I think it's very important...

'It was actually quite hard to concentrate'

on the filming side of it, because you were really caught up

in the emotion of the moment.

SHE BREATHES HEAVILY

I'm going to take treatment. I mean, there's no question about that.

If I...

If I take any treatment...

I mean, when I take treatment, I presume you're talking about eight more treatments

-or however many it's going to take.

-Yes, uh-huh.

-It will improve my chances?

-Quite definitely.

I would give you a different type of chemotherapy you haven't had before,

give you a drug called Taxotere,

-it's one of the relatively newer chemotherapy drugs.

-OK.

A lot of people will tolerate that drug quite well.

By and large, it's fairly well tolerated. And for a certain proportion of people,

they will get a very definite response,

get things back under control

and, you know, get back to good general health

and can remain well for a further period of time.

Get back under control, does that mean...

I mean, are we talking remission?

What I would be hoping to do is to get the disease well shrunk down,

get it that it is shrunken down and stable and then see how things go.

And in that situation, if we do get a response to treatment,

that can remain at bay,

it can remain keeping you well for a good many number of months.

SHE SIGHS I don't want to hear that.

I'm not blaming you...

'You have to try and concentrate'

on what you were doing as a job, but it was quite difficult

because this was really, you know, just one of those...

you know, harrowing moments in anyone's career

that you really hope not to have to repeat.

There's a lot of questions I need to ask you, there's a lot of stuff I need to talk about, but...

-I just can't do it today.

-That's OK.

You're welcome to come back and chat to me any time you want to.

We'll arrange that over the next few days.

I won't be starting you on any further treatment

until you're happy.

And then we packed up and we left,

and we were probably about 20 minutes or so, I suppose,

after Deirdre had left, and we walked out into the waiting room...

And there was Deidre sitting there.

I mean, we thought, you know, she was in bits when she left,

we thought she'd go straight home.

And there she was, sitting in the consulting room with her sister.

And I said, "I didn't expect you to still be here."

And she said, "I was just wondering if you might want to speak to me

"about, you know, anything else, based on what's just happened."

And I thought, you know, "After what's just happened to you,

"after the news you've just got,

"you're still thinking about what you can do that's best for the programme."

LIFT: Going down...

Breaking bad news is something that we teach medical students.

The scene what I informed Deidre about her diagnosis,

I am aware that that has been used in other places within Queen's,

where people have been told exactly how they should break bad news.

Whereas I can try this out on a lot of different people,

for the patient, you only tell them their bad news once.

And if you do it badly, you can devastate them.

CAR DOOR SLAMS

-SEAMUS ON TV:

-The treatment is a kind of afterthought....

'That sequence in the house with her making her lunch,

'we didn't do any more filming'

with her after that, because basically she went into hospital

very quickly after that. I mean, she just, you know, um...

deteriorated extremely rapidly.

MELANCHOLIC PIANO MUSIC

She phoned my sister the night she was sick...

..in the early hours of the morning and asked to come and pick her up and bring her to hospital.

The medical staff kept saying, "It's imminent."

So we called everybody to the room and she lasted another day,

and then another day.

I was speaking to Deidre this morning.

Sadly, although she is alert and I can talk to her and so on,

she is finding it difficult.

I think her condition is slowly getting worse.

'There's no way we were going to go into the hospital ward and'

try and get a few words with her when, as Seamus McAleer was saying,

she was really finding it quite difficult even to get her thoughts together and to get any words out.

And Deidre had to be fairly ill to be like that.

She seemed to wait until everybody had come in and said their bit to her.

And then we were all in the room, and she finally passed away.

Deidre had been a big part of my life for about two-and-a-half years,

and she was such a big character

that not having her about any more, you know, left quite a hole.

And, yeah, I was emotionally drained, I have to say.

Deidre died at the end of June, 1998.

The second programme was broadcast three months later,

the title taken from a line in her diary.

DISTANT CHANTING

Today Deidre's sister Brona has a well-established life in Muscat,

the capital of Oman.

But she hasn't entirely forgotten her roots.

I'm chairperson of the Irish Society,

and tonight is our St Patrick's Day Ball.

It's an annual event that is mainly for the Irish community,

but we have lots of friends,

so we're expecting about 330 people tonight.

It takes a lot of organisation in trying to pull a lot of things together,

because we try to get stuff over from Ireland.

We had an Irish community,

but wanted to try and make it a bit more official.

So I got the Irish community together, and we organised a logo,

and we put a committee together, and then I got the job

as chairperson by default, because, like my sister, I'm a bit gobby.

SHE LAUGHS

In Belfast, Seamus McAleer remains at the forefront

of cancer treatment.

He's widely regarded as Northern Ireland's top cancer specialist.

There's a brand-new, purpose-built cancer centre,

which we're sitting in today.

And that cancer centre makes it much easier to treat people.

We've got a massive big day patient facility now for giving chemotherapy as an out-patient.

In Deidre's time, a lot of chemo was in-patient.

It's virtually all out-patient now.

'In the time from I started with Deidre till now,

'we have very much formalised the role of oncology or cancer

'in the medical student curriculum.'

At screening, there showed up an abnormality...

'They all get a fortnight on oncology now.

'We have key things we want to teach them about cancer.'

There's a lot more they need to know

about managing patients who turn up with problems due to cancer

or, in fact, due to its treatment.

Whenever we look at women, and ask what cancers might they get,

by far and away the most common substantial cancer is to get breast cancer.

Nowadays, we think about one women in nine will get breast cancer,

and that's gone up every decade for the last while.

It's becoming more common as the years go on.

The benefit for the new drugs

and for all the things we have done in breast cancer

is a real improvement in the outcomes for cancer patients.

We now have over 80% of women surviving five years

after diagnosis of breast cancer.

That used to be 50, 60% if you go back a generation.

If Deidre were diagnosed nowadays,

the chance of her doing well would be higher.

She might still be someone who would die from disease,

but the chance of doing well would clearly be better.

IRISH FIDDLE EMANATES FROM BALLROOM

Well done, ladies, looks lovely.

Perfect.

Deidre was the traveller in the family.

She would have come over for St Patrick's Day.

Thank you, sweetheart, and same to you. Happy St Patrick's Day.

All right, no problem.

'She was the type of person that just loved to be socialising.

'She was a great person that loved Northern Ireland.

'She loved the chat and she loved the dressing up.'

'She didn't get to do it much, so when she did, she went all-out.'

She was really glad to get to the Rock And Pop Awards,

and that's in the second programme.

She was really excited when Bruce said to her,

and she invited me along, so she was thrilled.

She wanted to go and see it anyway,

but because Ronan Keating was there, whose mother had just passed away.

# Everybody hurts...#

Just to talk to him, because they had started up some kind of charity in her name.

# So you hold on... #

So we spent the night with Ronan Keating and his family. And it was a lovely night.

They had lots of things to talk about from the charity point of view

and what they were trying to do for breast cancer.

# Hold on... #

CHATTERING

Ladies and gentlemen, cead mile failte romhat.

A hundred thousand welcomes to you all on our national day of St Patrick.

APPLAUSE

And of course, the ball wouldn't be a success if there wasn't any of you here,

so give yourself a round of applause.

-APPLAUSE AND CHEERING

-And a cheer!

Perhaps the greatest change has come to the producer of the documentaries.

After 26 years at the BBC,

Bruce Batten no longer works in television.

'All the years I was in broadcasting,

'going out into the garden was always my release from the pressures

'of programme making.

'So when I decided to have a change of career,

'it was pretty natural for me to head towards the garden again.'

I have trained in garden design

and done some courses in general horticulture,

and I've designed and built a few gardens,

and now I'm teaching as well.

'A big part of teaching is learning.

'I mean, there's an awful lot of prep that goes into the classes that I teach.

'So I find that fantastic.

'But I also really get a great buzz out of being able to transfer

'what I know to other people,

'and see, you know, them getting ever more enthusiastic

'about the things that I'm interested in.'

What happened as we went on

is that Deidre in her own way became more and more spiritual.

And there was one occasion when she read out a small poem to us...

..that, again, looked on the positive side of life.

And I just thought when we started editing, saw that and thought,

"That would be a good way to end,"

because while Deidre didn't have a happy outcome in the end,

she would still want people who might be in that condition

to try and think favourably about their lives.

"I ask God for strength that I might achieve.

"I was made weak that I might learn humbly to obey.

"I asked for help that I might do greater things.

"I was given infirmity that I might do better things.

"I asked for riches that I might be happy.

"I was given poverty that I might be wise.

"I ask for all things that I might enjoy life.

"I was given life that I might enjoy all things.

"I was given nothing that I'd asked for

"but everything that I'd hoped for.

"Despite myself, my prayers were answered.

"I am among all men most richly blessed."

Isn't that fabulous?

MELANCHOLIC PIANO MUSIC

I remember a few weeks after she had passed,

and Friday is our Sunday in Saudi. Their weekends are different.

And I was having a really bad, low day.

And I was having a bath and I was crying and feeling sorry for myself.

And I got out of the bath and I walked up to my window.

And...was crying. And the next thing, I felt these arms round me,

giving me a big hug. And I started laughing.

Because she was either telling me to wise up

and move away from the window,

or she was giving me a hug to say, "It's going to be all right."

And it is.

She paved the way for us, she did what she could for us,

to make it easier for us.

And hopefully for other people who watch the programme.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd