Amy Dowden’s Illness – The Full Story of What This Strictly Star Has Been Through

Imagine a dance journal that, in a single night, goes from being full to empty. Amy Dowden experienced the same thing in May 2023, the day before her honeymoon, when she discovered a lump in her breast. She was thirty-two. There was no warning or build-up before the subsequent diagnosis of grade three breast cancer, which turned out to be two distinct types, ductal and lobular, occurring simultaneously. It just touched down. And the life she had built since she was eight years old in Caerphilly, class by class and competition by competition, was put on hold.

Over the past two years, Amy Dowden’s illness story has been told in bits and pieces in press interviews, Instagram videos, and BBC documentaries, but when you sit with it all at once, it’s still difficult to fully comprehend. cancer of the breast. a mastectomy. chemotherapy. sepsis. a clot of blood on her lung. Shin fractures caused by stress. surgery for reconstruction. treatment-induced early menopause.

Throughout it all, she has had Crohn’s disease since she was eleven years old, which, as she has explained, actually helped her get ready for what came next. “I’m used to enduring things,” she remarked. Just that sentence conveys a lot.

Long before Strictly, long before Blackpool’s Tower Ballroom, long before any of it, she was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease when she was a young child. She was raised in a working-class family in Caerphilly, where her mother worked in accounting, and her father was a carpenter. She was taught at a young age that pushing through was just the arrangement and that her body would occasionally work against her.

She claims that her parents instilled in her a work ethic that had nothing to do with dancing and everything to do with perseverance. The cancer might have affected her differently if she hadn’t had to manage her Crohn’s disease during those early years. Rather, it seems as though she came to the darkest time of her life with tools she was unaware she had.

Her first reaction upon learning that she would require a mastectomy was to request the removal of both breasts simultaneously. She didn’t want to go through the healing process, resume dancing, and then have to deal with the same battle in the other breast a few years later.

At first, her doctors advised against it because they wanted to concentrate on the cancer first, and the Crohn’s increased the risk of infection. She acknowledged that, albeit emotionally. She has been open about that incident in ways that most public figures would avoid, stating that she was afraid and didn’t fully consider all of her options. It’s more difficult to be honest than it seems, especially when it will eventually be captured on camera.

There was a price to pay for her decision to make so many things public, including the post-mastectomy photos, the video of her head being shaved in her own kitchen, and her appearance on Strictly Bald in 2024. As usual, trolls showed up, criticizing everything from the stage of her diagnosis to how she handled it.

After discovering that her cancer was stage two instead of stage four, one commenter seemed to feel compelled to draw attention to it as a sort of denigration. It’s a specific kind of cruelty that is difficult to describe and even more difficult to forget. “You can have hundreds of lovely comments,” she said, “and that one nasty comment is the one that stays with you.” The majority of people who have used the internet at all will be able to identify that exact feeling.

According to her own description, she had been determined to return to Strictly for the 2024 season since she first heard the word cancer. After twenty months of hospital stays, rehabilitation, and physical reconstruction, she collapsed backstage following her foxtrot during the sixth week of the new series while dressed as a scarecrow for the Halloween special. fractures caused by stress.

Once more, the dance floor was taken away. Without her, her partner JB Gill advanced to the final and placed second. From the sidelines, she observed. “I was heartbroken,” she admitted. “Absolutely gutted.” After that, there wasn’t much more to say.

Observing all of this over the past two years, it’s amazing that Dowden has never fully embraced the victim role, even in situations where it would have been completely justified. She made it feel like a tour. In actuality. In 2025, Reborn, a stage production co-created with fellow Strictly professional Carlos Gu, performed on over twenty dates throughout the United Kingdom.

The show’s plot revolves around two individuals who underwent a transformation and emerged from it. Chinese national dance champion Gu shared his personal tale of relocating to the UK and discovering his own identity. Together, the show attracted viewers who might have a deeper understanding of what it means to start over than most.

She recently discussed how people with chronic illnesses are discriminated against in the workplace because, in her words, it is assumed that they are untrustworthy. Her response was succinct and straightforward: people dealing with severe illness frequently put off tasks that would keep healthy individuals at home for a week. “We crack on,” she declared. It wasn’t a grievance. Delivered with the same matter-of-fact clarity that she applies to everything else, it was a statement of fact. Amy Dowden has suffered greatly as a result of her illness. Apparently, it hasn’t taken her voice.