'I miss having chemo now I'm clear of cancer': Extraordinary? Yes, but Jennifer Saunders' account of battling breast cancer is as honest as it is uplifting

Seated alongside hordes of braying children in the audience at a pantomime, Jennifer Saunders cut a dejected and weirdly out-of-place figure amid the wall-to-wall hilarity.
Shorn of her trademark sleek blonde hair — the result of gruelling cancer treatment — the lower half of her face was covered by a white, Michael Jackson-style surgical mask, on doctors’ orders to protect her weakened immune system.

Recovered: Jennifer Saunders, pictured in full health, says that chemotherapy took a crippling toll on her

That she was there at all, however, to support her long-time husband Adrian Edmondson — who was appearing on stage in Peter Pan in Canterbury — was
testament to her no-nonsense approach to the disease.
But in spite of her stoical refusal to be cowed by the punishing effects of six months of intravenous chemotherapy and the powerful breast cancer drug Herceptin, the medication had taken a crippling toll on the much-loved comedienne.
‘There are times when you want to cry all day,’ writes the French and Saunders star in her soon-to-be published autobiography, Bonkers: My Life in Laughs.
‘My lowest point came when I lost all my hair; every eyelash, every follicle . . . I felt chemical. I felt like a chemical.
‘Then I got a terrible rash all over my face. They think it was a reaction to the Herceptin. It was horrible. I felt like a great big overgrown baby with pimples all over my face. A big, horrible, red-faced baby.’
Her occasional method of coping with her debilitating treatment — drinking vodka with a female friend — would, no doubt, have found favour with her high-living alter ego, Edina, in the BBC sitcom Absolutely Fabulous.
‘You can drink when you’re doing chemo,’ insists Jennifer. ‘You’ve got so much s*** in your body you may as well be drunk.’

Suffering: Jennifer Saunders took this candid shot of herself during treatment for breast cancer

Of course, this admittedly unorthodox approach is hardly likely to find favour with her doctors, but it does rather chime with 55-year-old Saunders’ slightly off-the-wall attitude to her treatment.
‘The weird thing is that I came to quite enjoy my visits to the clinic,’ she writes.
‘If you’re me, having treatment is a fairly good thing: your life has a routine and pattern. You do what you’re told and I find that quite liberating.’
It involved her having a ‘portacath’ tube inserted in her arm into which the ‘huge horse syringe’ of red-coloured drugs would be injected.
What followed was like the mother of all hangovers. ‘It’s like a night on mixed spirits, wine and grappa. It’s a real cracker. It’s a humdinger,’ she says.
She describes how she sat in a large white chair in her own cubicle at the Central London hospital and was also given a ‘cold cap’; a helmet-like device that freezes the scalp and is supposed to help prevent hair loss caused by the side effects of the strong chemo drugs.

Diagnosis: Jennifer's cancer diagnosis came as she planned to take a year off following a tour with her comedy partner Dawn French

Jennifer goes on: ‘I had the same wonderful nurse every time. Joel was funny and a sharpshooter with the needle; bullseye every time. Friends would drop by with the papers and I had a rota of company keepers.
‘When the six months was up, I was relieved. But strangely I knew I would miss the routine.
'I would miss my hours in the white chair. I would miss laughing with Joel. I would even miss my portacath.’
Her diagnosis, in October 2009, came just as she planned a year off following the end of a farewell tour of Britain and Australia with her comedy partner Dawn French.
She booked a routine mammogram after a holiday in Spain with a friend who’d just gone through her own breast cancer treatment.

But doctors at London’s Royal Marsden hospital found the mother-of-three had two lumps in her left breast and she was immediately admitted for a lumpectomy.

Hard working: Instead of recuperating, Jennifer signed up to write the script for the Spice Girls' musical Viva Forever, one of the few flops of her career

Because she had been diagnosed with the fast-growing HER2 positive type of the disease, she was also put on a six-month course of chemotherapy and Herceptin, followed by a course of radiation.
But the cold cap treatment failed to stop her hair falling out and eventually, Freya, the youngest of her three daughters with Edmondson, shaved off what was left.
Undaunted, Jennifer ordered a custom-made wig woven from human hair.
Her fitting, she recalls, was a surreal experience that involved having layers of cling film wrapped tightly around her head on to which her hairline was drawn before being removed and used as template.

Much-loved: In a 30-year career Miss Saunders has won three Baftas and an International Emmy in 1994 for Absolutely Fabulous

Instead of taking time off to recuperate, she ploughed straight back into work.
She accepted an offer from Judy Cramer, the producer behind the hit Abba musical and film Mamma Mia! to pen the script for the Spice Girls musical Viva Forever!.
She wrote between bouts of treatment on days when she could barely get out of bed because of the side-effects of the drugs.
However, her efforts were in vain. The West End show was given a mauling by the critics, suffered low ticket sales and closed in June this year after a seven-month run with rumoured losses of £5 million.
It was one of very few flops in a 30-year career that has seen Miss Saunders win three Baftas and an International Emmy in 1994 for Absolutely Fabulous, the series she wrote and appeared in as Bollinger-swilling PR Edina Monsoon, alongside co-star Joanna Lumley.
The once highly successful French and Saunders, which ran for 20 years on the BBC until 2007, eventually fell victim to budget cuts at the corporation — a state of affairs which clearly still rankles.
Even now, she is prone to rant about ‘flaky’ TV executives who don’t stay long enough in their posts to make a difference.
She candidly admits she takes an antidepressant — the result of being prescribed another cancer drug, Tamoxifen, which caused the early onset of the menopause which she says was ‘fairly brutal’ and led to hot flushes, weight gain, a sense of mourning for her youth, and a feeling of pointlessness.
‘I just thought I was cross and that the whole world was wrong,’ she says. ‘Everyone was being stupid.’

She realised something was amiss when she and Edmondson took what was supposed to be a romantic holiday to Italy in the wake of her treatment.

Iconic: One of the commedienne's most famous roles was Edina in Absolutely Fabulous alongside Joanna Lumley

The couple flew to Milan and hired a tiny Fiat 500 to drive to their first stop, a hotel on the banks of the beautiful Lake Maggiore.
But as they passed row upon row of smart-looking hotels, she became increasingly annoyed that her husband had not booked them into any of them.
By the time they finally arrived in the room he had reserved for them on the internet, she had already made the decision it would not be good enough.
‘Ade had booked a lovely room with a balcony overlooking the lake. But it was not lovely enough for Evil Jennifer,’ she writes. ‘Why couldn’t I love it? What was wrong with me?’
On the next stop in Lake Como, she refused to stay in the hotel he had chosen for them and booked instead into the eye-wateringly expensive Villa d’Este, where rooms with a view cost £800-a-night. Even so, she was not satisfied. She says she still had a ‘strange hollow feeling, even as I lay there necking numerous £20 gin and tonics’.

Support: Jennifer has been married to comedian Ade Edmondson since 1985

Such emotional turmoil clearly came as something of a shock to Jennifer, who had been raised to present an English stiff upper lip to the outside world.
Born in Sleaford, Lincolnshire, the only girl in a family of three brothers, she spent her early years abroad in Cyprus and Turkey where her father, Tom, an RAF Group Captain (who was a awarded a CBE in 1969) was stationed.

Eventually, the family settled in posh Acton Bridge, Cheshire. It was an idyllic, thoroughly middle-class upbringing of ponies and annual visits to the Horse of the Year Show.

Memoirs: Jennifer Saunders' book Bonkers: My Life In Laughs goes on sale on October 10

But after Jennifer left home to study to be a drama teacher in London, tragedy struck.
Her brother Peter, who was three years her junior, died when he was 18. Clearly his loss remains raw even today.
Indeed, Jennifer does not mention his death in her book, save for a short reference in the acknowledgements section at the end.
But in a magazine interview to promote it at the weekend, she revealed Peter died in a motorbike accident.
Jennifer married Ade Edmondson in 1985, and they have three grown-up daughters, Ella, Beattie and Freya, plus grandson Freddie.
Their homes are a house in London and an imposing 400-year-old farmhouse with swimming pool, set in five acres on the edge of Dartmoor, which the couple bought 12 years ago.
Jennifer soon became a regular fixture among the country set, riding out with Freya and members of the Mid Devon Hunt in the nearby village of Chagford on the traditional Boxing Day drag hunt.
Despite being given the all-clear from cancer three years ago, it is a subject that obviously still looms large in Jennifer’s life. This week, she courted controversy by appearing to criticise fellow survivors of the disease.
Asked if she thought some people keep wearing cancer like a badge, she replied: ‘For ever, and I’ll give you why — because it is the job you don’t have to work for.
‘You get so much attention and, if you’re not used to that, I bet it can sway you a little. I’m used to it. My job gives me the attention I’d otherwise crave. They must be so p****d off when their hair grows back. And you think, “Oh, come on, cancer is so common now”.’
But given how bravely she has faced up to her frightening brush with the disease, surely Jennifer’s legions of adoring fans will be prepared to forgive her trademark forthrightness.