A woman who was diagnosed with stage 4 Hodgkin Lymphoma at the age of 33 has told how therapy helped her and said she’s now ‘got a totally new outlook on life’.
Former teacher and head of science Emily Keyworth, from Newcastle, was initially told by doctors that her symptoms, a persistent cough, breathlessness and exhaustion, were caused by asthma in February 2025.
But her life was turned upside down when she was given a cancer diagnosis, and had to undergo six gruelling rounds of intensive chemotherapy, which she says ‘massively took its toll, both physically and mentally’.
She was able to ring the bell following her treatment, a practice done by cancer patients after their final round of therapies such as chemotherapy or radiation. But she was then told she needed further treatment.
Emily, now 35, told LADbible: “I got pulled into the doctor’s office and told that I needed radiotherapy, so I had to cancel all my holidays and do 15 rounds of that.
“I was in hospital every day. I was speaking to other cancer patients and they were telling me about their stories and it actually just took a toll on my mental health. I realised that I was spiralling and I didn’t feel good.
“I’m such a positive person, but I knew that my friends and family were upset about my diagnosis as well, and I found it hard to open up to them. So I knew that I needed to speak to someone separately.”
It was then that Emily came across Lewis Capaldi’s advert for 735,000 hours of free therapy with BetterHelp for fans, and she was matched with a therapist the very next day.
She said: “I think because the process was so easy and quick, it made it that there wasn’t an option for me to like back out. I was just going ahead with it and being brave.
“I was so scared to start and I realised I was really getting caught up in the fact that I’d lost my hair and I’d gained a lot of weight and I was really spiraling about the way that I looked. And my therapist actually said to me, ‘Emily, you’re a survivor. Don’t forget that’.
“I think there’s a real stigma around talking about going through therapy, as soon as you say that people think what’s wrong with you? What’s happened? What’s the trauma? And I think more people need to stand up and be like, yeah I’m in therapy.
“You would go to a dentist appointment and you would make time for your hair appointment or go to the gym, it should actually just be something like that.
“It made me realise I’m so lucky to be alive, I’ve got a totally new outlook on life now and I’m determined to thrive and live the best life I possibly can.”
Now in remission, therapy has given Emily the confidence to quit a job she says was no longer making her happy, move to London and she has had the ‘best summer’ celebrating surviving the disease.
She was invited to Lewis Capaldi’s show at Wythenshawe Park last weekend (22 August), where she got the opportunity to meet Lewis and personally thank him for everything, as well as enjoy the show.
“I’m really excited to meet Lewis. Seeing someone so famous open up like that is really inspiring,” Emily said.
“So I’d say to Lewis, thanks for being an inspiration and a national hero, and thank you for being the push that I actually needed to sign up to therapy.
“I’m sharing my story today to hopefully inspire somebody else to do the same.”
Lewis Capaldi has been open about his mental health struggles over the years, taking a step back from music in 2023 after struggling with anxiety and worsening Tourette’s syndrome symptoms.
On therapy, Capaldi says: “It’s very easy when I start to feel good to almost assume I’m in the clear, but it’s almost like doing it [therapy] on the days where you feel good is more important than doing it on the days where you feel bad. It’s important, in those moments, to keep showing up and doing the work.”
Sana, a BetterHelp psychotherapist, has praised Capaldi for giving these free hours to those in need of their services.
She told LADbible: “It opens up the door for curiosity. It normalises it in a lot of ways, and I think it really shows in live action time how you transform pain into power and purpose.
“Watching a celebrity go through something huge so publicly, and then watching how they’ve recovered and made that part of their story. Why wouldn’t you be curious to try it?
“You can see just from those moments of him sharing what he was going through, his documentaries, how real he is, and people being like, I relate to that. And taking action because that’s exactly what he did.”
Sana encourages anyone who feels scared to try therapy to be brave, adding: “Scary is normal. That’s how you build courage, it should be scary. Anything worth doing is going to be hard, but just bite the bullet.”
