‘There was no spark in my eyes': Lynsey Bennett reflects on how cancer changed her

CervicalCheck campaigner Lynsey Bennett has looked back on the moment five years ago when she first found out she had cancer, giving her followers an insight into her struggle with her shock diagnosis.

The mother-of-two marks five years since she was diagnosed with cervical cancer diagnosis on Wednesday (January 19), revealing she knew her ‘head and body were both falling apart’ before her illness was confirmed.

Taking to Instagram, the 33-year-old shared a collage of photos of herself prior to the life-changing news when she was told she would need to travel to Dublin for a radical hysterectomy.

‘Looking back over these old pictures of only a month before I was told and it really makes you think what does someone with cancer look like? You really can’t judge a book by [its] cover. You also can’t compare one cancer patient to the next,’ she wrote.

‘To anyone who’s not me, I’d of just looked like a girl who was out, for Xmas work party, birthday celebrations, Stephens night etc you wouldn’t know the bleed I would wake up to the next morning out of no where.

‘Personally I knew when I looked in the mirror that there was no spark in my eyes anymore, I had to nap before I could even go out, I use to cry walking up stairs, my patience was short, I was snappy, I knew my head and my body were both falling apart. But I couldn’t understand why.’

Lynsey went onto say that she was encouraged by people who say how great she looks after being told more than a year ago that she had six to eight months to live.

‘I shouldn’t be alive let a lone as mobile as I am,’ she wrote before giving an update about her preparations to attend a specialist cancer clinic in Germany after she was told she couldn’t return to Mexico for treatment.

‘I am even more in love with clinic in Germany finally got invoice last week and cost of my personal treatment plan after talking with their doctor on zoom,’ she wrote.

‘And it is half the price of what I thought it was going to be (after seeing negative review from a silly billy I was worried) but it’s around the €38,000 mark for 4 weeks.

‘And more the €10k mark a week instead of the €20k a week it means if I have a good result aka: it gets things back to stable like Mexico then going back every couple of months for a week will be much more sustainable.’