Elizabeth Hurley tragically lost her grandmother to breast cancer and has been campaigning to raise awareness ever since. She often shares posts about the importance of women checking for lumps in their breasts, and during an appearance on Good Morning Britain, she revealed that one particular post helped two of her friends discover their diagnosis before it was too late.
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Speaking to GMB hosts Richard Madeley and Susanna Reid, Elizabeth recalled the story: "I shared a post on Instagram about self-checking," she began. "Two friends, both in their 40s, who had not checked themselves, they both checked after seeing my Instagram and two of them found lumps and two of them went to the doctor, two of them were diagnosed with breast cancer and two have gone through treatment.
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"They're fine because they found it very early. They found a lump themselves, but they actually wouldn’t have self-checked had they not seen the Instagram that I did on behalf of our campaign. So, just hearing that alone makes you think, please ladies, start to check."
Susanna Reid replied: "The irony is you don’t want to check because you don’t want to find anything. Bottom line is, that’s why people don’t check isn’t it? And yet if you find something, you're more likely to survive."
Elizabeth concluded: "Exactly."
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Liz's friends were lucky that they took her advice, but Liz's grandmother didn't discover the cancer soon enough. Back in 2017, Liz said "it could have been different" for her grandmother if she had been diagnosed today, rather than in the early 1990s, since people "didn't talk about it" back then, and believed her grandmother would have felt "embarrassed" and "scared".
Liz is a global ambassador for The Estee Lauder Companies' Breast Cancer Campaign, and she explained that it was the loss of her grandmother that encouraged her to get involved on an episode of This Morning: "When I started working for the breast cancer campaign, my grandmother had just died.
"When I was told it was started because women were dying, it really rang home for me, because she didn’t talk about it. There was no awareness, no pink ribbon campaign."
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