When I talked at The Eve Appeal’s fund raising event at Claridge’s in November 2014, I confess I did set out to shock. I told the audience they’d have to excuse me because my hair’s a mess. It’s just started to regrow after chemotherapy this summer and I can’t do a thing with it. I told them I was shattered as I’m in the middle of a course of radiotherapy.

I said that this is the reality of treatment for a lot of women with gynaecological cancer. “I was diagnosed with advanced womb cancer in February and frankly my life hasn’t been my own since. The treatment is brutal, it’s gruelling, it’s boring and it leaves you looking and feeling like crap. It’s not that I’m not grateful – of course I am. Without it, my beautiful girls, who are 10 and 14, would be without a mother and my darling husband without a wife.”

It’s true, every word of it, but perhaps not the way I’d choose to talk to women who might be affected by womb cancer. You might want to hear how it came to this. When diagnosed early, womb cancer can often be cured by surgery alone. How have I ended up losing the best part of a year of my life to this treatment?

It started with my periods going haywire. I first spoke to my doctor last October telling him I hadn’t stopped bleeding for two weeks. Come back when it’s stopped he said. It didn’t and so neither did I. What with Christmas and New Year and the certainty that when I did go to the doctor he’d want to do an internal examination, I didn’t go back until January. My doctor was great and immediately made all the right referrals that led to a rapid diagnosis and treatment. But my delay coupled with the aggressive type of cancer I developed meant it was pretty advanced by the time the surgeons operated. The doctors are hoping to cure me but this cancer will be back. It’s the nature of the disease I have.

I don’t think I’m alone in delaying seeking treatment for gynae symptoms. It’s not fun, is it ladies? Some symptoms I did not recognise for what they were; it is only in retrospect that I realise that the slightly painful sex I had experienced for a year or more was cancer rather than scar tissue from two difficult births.

If you told me you have the same symptoms as me, I’d say get down to your GP without delay. I’d tell you that you probably don’t have cancer – the same symptoms feature in many women’s conditions. But if it is cancer, then delay can be fatal. I’d warn you that you may have to battle for your GP to take you seriously – particularly if you are pre menopausal – but that if your symptoms persist, then so must you.

As a mother of two girls, I am passionate about prevention and early diagnosis of women only cancers. I want to see tests developed that can be offered as part of routine care for women who are displaying symptoms. I want a future where women, including young women, know the symptoms to look out for. I’d like better genetic screening to pin point some of those who might be at risk and better treatments.

That’s why I am right behind The Eve Appeal’s fund raising and awareness campaign. For the sake of the women my daughters will become, we need research to deliver this vision; research that will save women’s lives.