At 27, I Was Diagnosed With Breast Cancer. But I Was Never Not Gonna Dance Again.

Twenty-seven. A midlife crisis. Desperate for change.

I’d spent the best part of my 20s working in London as a dancer, choreographer, and teacher, so when I got the opportunity to take my work and skills across the world, I was ecstatic! I just didn’t realize that “break” would turn into more than a year of treatment and recovery.

Dance had been my whole life. My reason to live. That is, until a big fat cancer diagnosis got thrown at me.

Quickly, my life went from endless dance classes and random (but cool) jobs across London to endless scans, blood tests, and oncology appointments. All because I found a lump in my left breast four days before I was due to go teach dance in China. (Brilliant.)

In classic Lucy fashion, I still went to China. To cut a story short, I got the lump checked and received my diagnosis four weeks into the job and sent straight back to the UK. I received six rounds of chemotherapy, countless blood tests and scans, steroids, ovarian-suppression injections, a lumpectomy, lymph-node removal, 20 rounds of radiotherapy, and a year of targeted therapy. I remember crying in the car during treatment because, for the first time, I didn’t know what I was going to do with my future. Dance as I knew it had changed forever, and stepping away wasn’t something I had chosen.

Treatment changed my body: constant fatigue, brain fog, weight gain. Surgery changed my ability to move in the way I always had. All of what I had been through gave me a completely new outlook on my body and my life. How much my body had done for me made me appreciate it so much more. But moving was a whole new experience.

For the first time, dance as I’d known it wasn’t physically available to me anymore. I felt desperate to move my body again and get my life back. Then one day, I heard “Never Gonna Not Dance Again,” by P!nk, while doing what I always do to get me through: dancing in my room, even if chemo had me feeling so sick that sometimes the dancing was only happening in my head.

That’s when I realized the answer to my own question that night I’d cried in the car, wondering what I was going to do with my future. I was NEVER not going to dance again.

Dance didn’t have to be this big shiny thing for me to chase. I’d forgotten what it was really about: Joy. Community. Freedom. Confidence. Cancer may have changed my life, but dance reminded me that I was still living it.

You get told when you finish chemotherapy that the hardest part is over. So you can imagine how happy I was when I finished my last round! I was back in class after three weeks, and so excited to begin my dance life again. Little did I know that chemo was only the beginning.

My cancer journey had become the start of something special: DANCE • LIVE • CHECK YOUR CHEST, a dance-led breast cancer awareness campaign I began during treatment that uses dance to encourage people to check their chest and know their normal. Dance has always been an incredible tool for me to feel empowered in my own body, so using it for the campaign only felt right.

I knew I wanted to create a flash mob, as I’m never not moved by seeing a group of people come together and dance for joy, and I wanted to use that same feeling to inspire awareness in others. The idea I first pitched to a friend during chemo grew into something that, today, has reached and helped a lot of people—even far beyond the dance world. It’s grown into a community of survivors, creatives, and people whose lives have been touched by cancer.

Breast cancer is scary, and before my diagnosis I avoided thinking about it. That made me wonder: How could that fear become something much more encouraging?

That’s the goal behind DANCE • LIVE • CHECK YOUR CHEST, which I hope inspires everyone to be confident in their bodies—enough to know if something isn’t right. And to me, dance, with its joy, community, and freedom, felt like the perfect way to do that.