Dame Deborah James has said in her posthumous book that her “periods of frequent, crippling panic attacks” stopped when she was diagnosed with incurable cancer. The podcaster and campaigner, known by her social media handle Bowel Babe, died on June 28 at the age of 40 after suffering from bowel cancer.
In an extract from her forthcoming book How To Live When You Could Be Dead published in The Sun, she wrote about living with anxiety for most of her life. Dame Deborah said she had once suffered a panic attack while in the changing room of a Karen Millen store in London’s Covent Garden, causing her to flee on to the street in her underwear.
She added: “I often woke up in the middle of the night already in the grip of an episode, believing my body was dying. The great irony, of course, being that when I was younger and not facing death, my fear of it was so uncontrolled that quite often it stopped me from living.
