BEN advice columnist Vicky Maud has revealed her own secret agony - her fight against cancer. The woman who each week helps thousands of people in the Bolton area and right across the country face their problems explained how she tackled the biggest one of her life "by being positive and refusing to give in". Now, she hopes to help other sufferers with a frank new book she is planning, provisionally entitled "Don't Be Frightened Because You Have Cancer." Vicky's personal drama began six years ago when she returned from a trip to Kenya, and noticed a lump on her neck.

At first, it looked as though it could be Tuberculosis, but tests showed that it was a secondary tumour which needed an immediate operation.

"It was a shock. I brooded for a couple of days," recalls Vicky. "But the feeling after that is very much like being in a goldfish bowl. Everything is going on around you but you feel very isolated."

Vicky took strength from her loving family (she has four children and two grandchildren and has been married to husband Ken for 32 years), but still found that sometimes it was SHE who had to provide the strength to help her loved ones cope with her cancer.

"I think that when you are told you have cancer you go one of two ways. You can sit around and brood, then give in. Or, you can decide to fight back, decide that this illness will have to fit in with YOUR life," she explained during a visit this week from her home in the South to the BEN's offices in Churchgate. Surgery followed, and the prognosis eventually looked good. Then three years ago, the primary cancer was discovered in her tonsil.

Again, Vicky had to draw on all her resources, but the determination to fight re-surfaced.

Radiotherapy followed surgery and now Vicky has been told she has to have check-ups only every six months - a good sign.

"From early on I used practices like visualisation to tackle the cancer," she said.

"A friend told me to imagine that the operation was like a stone being taken out of an avocado. The bad is all scooped away leaving the good." And has having cancer changed her? "I think it has made me slightly more selfish, and it has made me work harder."

Certainly, Vicky looks the picture of health and seems to thrive on the kind of itinerary that even your average travel agent would baulk at.

She is a British representative on the International Centre for Drug Abuse Prevention in Schools and has travelled with them to the Philippines, Finland and Nepal. She also regularly attends conferences by press councils and complaints' commissions from around the world. This year alone, her commitments will take her to Sri Lanka, the Philippines, India, China, Mauritius, Nigeria, Cambodia and Finland.

She is also "agony aunt" for newspapers like the Bolton Evening News and its sister 'paper the Lancashire Evening Telegraph, plus various other regional newspapers up and down the country, and on magazines. Vicky is also a regular on BBC TV and radio, and is an author. In fact, her latest book - which is likely to be a much talked-about volume on confronting the emotions of retirement - will be published by Sheldon Press in June.

"I want the word 'happiness' in the title because I believe that retirement can be a very happy and positive time. It can be the start of a new beginning for many people." And she is also now working on her book about taking the fear out of cancer.

Vicky understands the dangers of being high-profile about her illness. She is concerned how cancer sufferers themselves feel when role models like Marti Caine and Roy Castle, who offered so much hope and help to people, themselves die of cancer. But, because she is a caring, warm woman who has a genuine empathy with others, Vicky automatically wants to help, in the best way she knows: with practical words of wisdom guaranteed to make a difference to someone else's life.

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