I was singing my one-woman show out in Tahiti on one of those super duper luxury cruise liners where an average conversation amongst guests will invariably include the words pearls, penthouses and Prada. The kind of gig where you’re really not meant to mess it up. And there I was, messing it up. Every breath caused me pain, I couldn’t support the sound and I was throwing up between shows. Walking up the stairs back to my luxury stateroom, I had to stop to rest every 5 steps, and don’t get me started on the night sweats. Something was very wrong.

I made the long journey back to London and my mother picked me up from LHR so I didn’t have to wrestle with the tube. “I don’t think I’m very well, Mummy,” I said. Two days later I was in hospital, the x-ray having shown a shadow on the right lung and an emergency CT scan booked.

That was February 2011. After many more tests and bags of treatment I was diagnosed with BOOP (bronchiolitis obliterans organising pneumonia) – a rare auto-immune lung disease resulting in an inflammation of the bronchioles, causing acute shortness of breath, fatigue and hideous night sweats. Not great for any human being. Pretty nasty for a singer.

I was very quiet about the diagnosis at the time (who wants to hire a soprano with a lung disease, after all) and only shared it with those closest to me - the Inner Circle, as I called it.  I got myself into the mind frame of ‘recovery’ (‘rest’ wasn’t a word I ever welcomed), and then set about building myself back up to physical and vocal strength with my physio. 

This took 6 months - seems nothing really, in retrospect, but at the time I didn't know whether I'd walk up the steps of an aircraft again, let alone perform a 45-minute show. 

My treatment was corticosteroids, and my rehab involved walking - 30 seconds walk, 2 minutes rest, 30 seconds walk, 2 minutes rest, blah, blah, blah, generally with a day of doing nothing in between. On that day, I would study stellar sopranos on YouTube, get into Mahler, sleep, sleep some more, speak to gorgeous friends and family if I had the energy, watch repeats of Sex and the City and eat chicken soup. 

I was consumed with frustration. Frustration that my body was failing me and that I didn’t have the lung capacity nor energy to support a single note. God did I miss singing. I realised just how important the physical act of producing sound was to me and how deeply it is linked to my identity.

Gradually the walking turned to running. 1 minute run, 2 minute walk, rest, 1 minute run, 2 minute walk, rest ...until eventually I was running for 10/20/30 minutes continuously. Feeling that freedom, that air, that joy was indescribable. It still is.

Enough time has passed now for me to be able to write about this period with a sense of detachment, and I am absolutely thrilled to be running my second half marathon on March 29th on #teambreathe for the British Lung Foundation, the only UK charity looking after the nation’s lungs. Now that I’m very much the other side of lung disease, I want to do as much as possible to support this charity close to my heart and do everything I can to help with their mission "together we're making sure that one day everyone will breathe clean air with healthy lungs."

I'm enormously honoured to be on #teambreathe and I’ll be wearing my BLF running vest again with pride in March as I run past the beautiful Landmarks of London. I’ve read up on all the running lingo: fartlek/tempo/ threshold training… but the best advice I was given in preparation for 13.1 miles is this:  go at your own pace and listen to your body. 

I can’t think of a better way of approaching a happy, healthy life. 

Thanks for reading. Lots of love

FJ xxx