Tessa Jowell has called for patients to be able to trial more experimental cancer treatments on the NHS as she spoke about being diagnosed with a brain tumour.
The Labour peer and former culture secretary will make a speech in the House of Lords on Wednesday, urging health managers to allow patients to opt for innovative treatments as they can in other countries.
Jowell, 70, said she was travelling to Germany for pioneering treatment after the NHS said it could not offer her any more to treat a high-grade brain tumour known as glioblastoma, which was diagnosed in May 2017.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, she said: “I tell you something? I am absolutely 100% trying to stay alive. That is exactly the kind of risk that patients should be free to take. It should be a risk that they have the chance to take and it’s certainly what somebody like me wants.
“It got to the point in the NHS in London where I couldn’t be given any more treatment but it was very clear that if I went to Germany then I had a chance of taking out this immunotherapy, a new experiment. I was and I am prepared to try that.”
Jowell, who was credited with helping win the 2012 Olympics for London when a minister under Tony Blair, said she had received thousands of letters from well-wishers since she went public last year.
“I have so much love in my family, my children, my close friends it’s the most extraordinary, blessed and recreating sense and I feel that I want that to be experienced by so many other people as well,” she said in the interview with the Today presenter Nick Robinson, who was treated for a lung tumour in 2015.
“I was deeply touched by Seamus Heaney’s last words, when he said do not be afraid. I am not afraid. I feel very clear about my sense of purpose, and what I want to do, and how do I know how long [my life is] going to last. I’m certainly going to do whatever I can to make sure it lasts a very long time.”
The interview with Robinson, in which Jowell occasionally stumbled over her words, was pre-recorded but she was in the Today studio to hear it played back. Jowell received a round of applause from other guests who were on the programme for its cancer special.