Queen Mother

catherine58

Hello fellow semicolons ...

I don't know whether this story has already been in the American press but, if not, I thought it might give hope ... A new authorised biography of the Queen Mother has revealed that she survived for 35 years after surgery to remove a tumor on her colon. I am pasting the story from the BBC website below ... Oddly enough I just read the autobiography of her surgeon's daughter (Clarissa Dickson Wright) who referred to her father performing the QM's colostomy operation, so who knows what the truth is. In any case she put cancer behind her and went on to lead a long, active life, dying in her sleep aged 101 ...


The Queen Mother had colon cancer at the age of 66 and surgery removed a tumour, her official biography reveals.
The book, published on Friday, says she underwent the 90-minute operation in December 1966 at the King Edward VII Hospital in central London.
Clarence House said at the time she had undergone abdominal surgery to relieve a partial obstruction.
The biography discredits the long-held belief the Queen Mother was fitted with a colostomy bag during the procedure.
Biographer William Shawcross interviewed Sir Richard Thompson, the Queen's former physician, for the official version of the Queen Mother's life.
It says the Queen Mother spent more than two weeks in hospital and when discharged cancelled all her official engagements for the first three months of 1967.
Some years later the Queen's physician at the time, Sir Richard Bayliss, wrote to one of the Queen Mother's ladies in waiting, saying that the lie of the "colostomy" operation should be countered.
The biographer added: "But the rumours that the operation had included a colostomy persisted.
"Many people who had to endure that operation themselves derived comfort from the belief that even someone with as active a life as Queen Elizabeth could manage so well after such a difficult procedure."
The Queen Mother successfully beat the disease, dying in her sleep in 2002 age 101.