Incredible gran who beat cancer four times in six years!

HOW CHRIS DEFIED THE ODDS

- BY MATTHEW BARBOUR

Chris rings the hospital bell to mark being free of cancer

A GRANDMOTHER who beat four separate cancers in just six years actually insists she's "one of the luckiest people ever born".

When Chris Smith tells people she has survived four different cancers, their first response is always the same: "How unlucky can one person be?" But the 73-year-old grandmother from Abergele, North Wales, sees it differently.

"I explain to them that I'm one of the luckiest people ever born," she says with a smile. "Because having cancer actually saved my life three times over."

She explains that if she hadn't developed bladder cancer in 2018, she would never have had the regular surveillance scans that subsequently caught three more deadly tumours lung, throat and pancreatic all at stages early enough to treat.

"People don't understand," she says. "Each cancer was completely unrelated, all primary cancers, all the same type squamous cell carcinoma.

"But it was the scans from the first one that kept finding the others. Without bladder cancer, I wouldn't be here today."

The chances of developing all four cancers is approximately one in eight million add in the chances of developing them and beating them, and she's one in two billion.

Chris grew up in Scotland but spent most of her adult life in Manchester as a banker and Slimming World consultant before moving to North Wales with her husband Colin in 2018.

She'd never been seriously ill, had no family history of cancer, and genetic testing revealed no predisposition.