For Better or for Worse Amid Health Scare
- Pop star Samantha Fox, 56, says she is going along with wedding plans in the coming days to marry her fiancée of six years, Linda Olsen, after suffering from a throat cancer scare.
- The “I Wanna Have Some Fun” singer already put off nuptials due to the pandemic interfering with their plans last year, and this time, she will not let anything get in the way of saying “I Do.”
- Fox says she is having surgery after her wedding and assures fans that she will be fine.
- The highly common sexually transmitted virus HPV, human papillomavirus, is a known cause of throat cancer.
Fox, who also goes by “Sam,” says she will have surgery after her big day, and assured fans during an appearance on Good Morning Britain that everything is “fine.”
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“I’d like to say a quick thing to my fans out there, I’ve got an operation on my throat coming up very very soon … and I’m getting a lot of messages where people are worried because they’re not sure if it’s sinister or not,” she said. “As soon as I’m married, I’m gonna get it taken out and I’m sure everything is going to be fine.”
In an earlier interview with The Sun, the East London native said when she saw the lump on the screen during her scan, she thought “‘Oh God, that's not normal.' It looked very big," she said. "You think about throat cancer straight away."
Fox said that both she and her bride-to-be began crying when Fox discovered the lump, because "they feared the worst."
Having a cancer scare at any point in your life is scary, and it’s especially difficult getting news like this ahead of a beautiful milestone.
Fox tragically lost her ex partner and manager Myra Stratton to cancer after spending 12 years together, so the scare is likely bringing back some difficult memories, which further explains why she’s not letting anything get in the way of her special day.
“It’s been a difficult couple of years for me,” the former model told ITV’s This Morning in 2016. “The suffering is over… suffered for a good two years.”
“She was told she was terminal two years before she died, so that was the most difficult time, the two years leading up to her death.”
Fox told her co-stars that the pair were engaged during her 2009 filming of I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!.
“We’re engaged, we got engaged this year in Thailand,” she had said during the joyous time of her first proposal. “The first year we met we both got tattoos on our fingers, we knew, I knew she was going to be my soulmate for the rest of my life.”
Related: The Toughest Conversations: Losing a Spouse to Cancer
Despite her suffering, the grieving artistwho also sadly lost her mother to cancershared her gratitude at the time for turning 50.
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“Most of my life has been amazing I must say, so I feel honoured, even just to still be here sitting on this couch!” she said.
HPV and Throat Cancer
Though we don’t know how much of a scare Fox is currently facingnor do her doctors until she gets the lump removedit’s important to learn about HPV’s involvement with causing throat cancer and other head and neck cancers, along with cervical and anal cancer.
HPV, or human papillomavirus, is a highly common sexually transmitted virus that affects both men and women.
"The vast majority of humans in the U.S., both men and women, will eventually get infected with human papillomavirus," says Dr. Allen Ho, a head and neck surgeon at Cedars-Sinai. "The important thing to know about HPV is that there are many different strains, and only a couple of them tend to be more cancer-inducing. Probably less than 1% of the population who get infected happen to have the cancer-causing virus that somehow their immune system fails to clear, and over 15 to 20 years [it] develops from a viral infection into a tumor, and a cancer."
HPV and Cancer Risk The Basics
The HPV vaccine, which was recently approved in the U.S. for people up to age 45, though it's recommended that children get it before they become sexually active, can prevent a lot of these cancers.
Gardasil 9 protects against nine strains of HPV including the strains most likely to cause cancer and genital warts. But it can't provide protection if a person has already been exposed to HPV. That's why doctors recommend it for children as young as 9.
‘People Need to Know That HPV Can Cause These Cancers’
Unfortunately, there wasn’t any knowledge about the connection with HPV and cancer until recent years, so later generations were unable to protect themselves with a vaccine. HPV was discovered and identified in the early ’80s, and the first HPV vaccine wasn’t available until 2016.
We wish Samantha and Linda well and hope they will be able to put their fears behind them and enjoy their big day together until they learn more come surgery time. Quite often, most lumps are benign, or non-cancerous, and we surely hope that is the case here!
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