When I was 16 my mother discovered a pea-sized lump on her breast and life for our family was never the same again.

I was an only child and I remember so well my father and I seeing her board the mail boat at Dun Laoghaire for the Royal Marsden Hospital in London, a specialist cancer hospital, to be under the care of the ominous-sounding top cancer surgeon Ronald Raven.

I knew absolutely nothing about cancer, or its seriousness, until realisation hit when we got the phone call a couple of days later summoning us to London, as following a radical mastectomy my mother was unlikely to survive the night.

I hadn't thought about the Royal Marsden for years until I saw Jade Goody arriving there last year for her treatment and it sent a shiver down my spine. My mother spent almost a year in London, in and out of the Royal Marsden, all of which had to be kept a total secret back in Ireland.

I lied solidly for the next seven years to friends and neighbours as to her whereabouts and health, and became an expert on subterfuge for she did not want it known under any circumstances that she had cancer. "Dublin is a small place and once you visit a cancer hospital here word gets around -- you never know who you will meet," she said.

She was prepared to face the loneliness of London on her own rather than have the "shame" of her secret come out at home.

There wasn't any chemo treatment back then which could have prolonged her life, but she survived another seven years before eventually succumbing to secondaries. They weren't great years -- there was a lot of surgery -- but they were precious years and ones neither of us would have wanted to miss.

We had our laughs and a lot of tears, including the day I came home and found a letter from the BBC to whom she had written asking where she could get artificial boobs like she had seen Danny La Rue wear on TV. The only prostheses available then were awful, heavy flesh-coloured "bean bags" to put in a bra.

This was back in the early Seventies when the 22-year- old British athlete Lillian Board, diagnosed with bowel cancer and with only two months to live, was hitting the headlines by going to Switzerland for a new herbal treatment. Farrah Fawcett Majors was at the height of her career in Charlie's Angels. Her golden smile and luxuriant blonde hair portrayed the epitome of good health.

Today everybody goes public about everything! Cameras followed Jade Goody almost to the bitter end. Whether or not you liked Jade, the courage of the girl was amazing as she focused, not on herself, but on amassing money to provide a future for her two boys. We agonised with her struggle, mesmerised by how the cameras watched her life ebbing away.

Now we have just had Farrah Fawcett's video diary of her treatment for anal and liver cancer over the past three years. For both of these women, the making of documentaries about their cancer treatment raised awareness and was a distraction for them from what is one of the biggest agonies of cancer -- one's own fears and thoughts in the depths of the night.

The publicity around the fact that Jade had left the seeking of treatment too late certainly raised awareness and there was a huge uptake in screening for cervical cancer. Hopefully, the same will now happen with the focus on Farrah's anal cancer.

For both Farrah and Jade and their families, it may have provided a focus on living out their time rather than dying. I have lost other friends to cancer -- one a young mother of five with an inoperable brain tumour; my cousin's child aged six with the same problem; and a 16-year-old schoolfriend of my son's -- but ultimately I have never forgotten nursing my mother on my own right up to the full and final last minute of her too young life, as my father had died of a heart attack after her diagnosis.

Communications expert Terry Prone wrote an article recently in the Irish Examiner which I consider to be callous in the extreme and which should never have been published. She is entitled to her views on whether these TV documentaries should be made or screened but does she think that cancer sufferers, once diagnosed, suddenly lose their ability to read?

She referred to the "nonsense talked by oncologists. Each one of us has had friends or relations diagnosed with some form of cancer known to be 100 per cent lethal. Each one of us has seen those friends or relations eagerly submit themselves to treatments carrying brutal side-effects, delightedly reporting the experts' tests as showing the tumour has shrunk by 25 or 50 per cent. (Since cancer always seems to be spoken about in terms of a fruit basket, the tumour is often described as shrinking from grapefruit to tangerine size.)

Few of us, watching the bright-eyed face under the scarf concealing the chemo-baldness, have had the courage to say 'You've suffered two months of hell to get yourself to a position where any passing infection will kill you, in order to reduce the size of a cancer that will definitely kill you, so that you can go through the same miseries you went through the first time it grew, all over again. What have you gained?'"

She continued, "We don't say it because hope is the thing with feathers and it is regarded as cruel to assassinate it, even if the real cruelty is encouraging the patient through pointless torture. Not that they would listen, anyway. Nobody listens, once the team has described them as 'cancer-free'. Oh, that wonderful statement.

The patient hears it as 'You're cured. You're not going to die.' One memoir after another records the phrase, followed, within weeks or months, by a call from the hospital announcing the need for further tests, because something has shown up, or by the return of the unmistakable symptoms. And yet received wisdom holds that optimism is a duty and truth-telling in some way destructive."

Terry Prone is a very bright articulate woman who has bored us to death with details of her cosmetic surgery and her political spin. I don't know if she has been that close to anyone who died from cancer but for a communications

expert she sure has communicated with cancer sufferers and survivors.

She has devastated many of them unnecessarily. Is she trying to save money for the Health Service, as suggested by Miriam Cotton of Clonakilty who also wrote to the Irish Examiner? Indeed, she may very well do so because some people are likely now to say "why should I bother?". Can you imagine the tears that have been shed this week in many already anxious homes around the country. Each and every day of life is precious.

More than 50 per cent of cancers, if caught early enough, are completely curable. As to other cancer patients -- what does she want them to do? Lie down and die?

It's like saying to the prisoners in Belsen or war-torn countries -- don't bother trying to survive, just go straight to the crematorium.

Most of even the more difficult cancers can be maintained for quite a period of time -- some for many, many years -- and they will need ongoing treatment to cure blockages and other complications. Patients undergoing treatment can have a very good quality of life for a very long time and still be around for the family weddings, christenings and parties that define families, lives, and memories for generations.

An oncologist generally sits down with the patient and gives them their options.

That is what they do nowadays -- they tell them the bare truth and do not fob them off. I have known many cases where people were sent home to "put their affairs in order" They do not put people through pointless chemo unless there is the possibility of a complete cure or it greatly extending their lifespans.

And who has the right to deny them this chance at prolonging their lives?

Other patients, such as Nuala O Faolain, may make the decision to reject chemo, if it is not going to extend their life greatly.

Cancer patients are extremely upset by what Terry Prone so cruelly wrote, not least the Mooney Show Domestic Goddess, Margaret Browne from East Cork, who both put pen to the Irish Examiner expressing her distress and also spoke very movingly on the Mooney Show last Monday.

Margaret Browne, a former nurse, is no fool and knows exactly the battle she is fighting with her ovarian cancer. She has laughed and cried with wigs and scarves.

She is juicing some awful green stuff and eating a healthy fresh diet, walking for miles and fit as a flea, and during all of this time she has always been up for fun and a good night out. She is giving this battle her all, and how dare Terry Prone demean it and others like her.

During the course of having a go at the Farrah documentary Terry Prone mocked Ryan O'Neal's tearful TV appearances and described the devastated long-term partner as looking in the documentary like a "raddled pantomime dame in a towelling dressing gown" If it was not in his dying wife's bedroom it might be a smart but cheap shot; but remember that a woman died in all of this.

Has Terry Prone forgotten in her zealous glittering media career that even celebrities have feelings and families, not to mention our thousands of cancer patients?

Terry Prone should have put her brain in gear before she shot her mouth off. I hardly think her article is a good example of public relations.