THE words ‘treatable’ and ‘curable’ sound so similar it would be easy to think they mean the same thing.

But Frances Mansfield, better known as Fred, realised the wide gulf between the two terms when she was told that cancer had returned to her body.

“The doctor said ‘it’s treatable, it isn’t curable,’” she remembers.

“I don’t think I really realised the difference between those two words so much before.”

Fred, had already fought cancer once, having been diagnosed with breast cancer five years earlier.

But this time it was different. Cancer was now covering much of her liver. She was told it was terminal.

Her husband Richard was with Fred when she was told the devastating news.

“The consultant said ‘some go six months, some even go a year’, but he diagnosed less than three months,” he says.

That was in August 2012. Frances has had a tough, three-year battle to get to where she is today, a youthful and healthy-looking 51-year-old.

“I don’t remember getting to the three or the six month mark and thinking ‘I’ve made that’,” says the mother-of-one from Bitterne, Southampton.

“But this year I have thought ‘crumbs, I’ve just hit the three year mark.”

When Frances first had cancer in 2007, she had a mastectomy and chemotherapy.

She says she remained positive throughout her treatment that it wasn’t going to beat her.

Life had returned to normal when she started to feel ill a lot of the time in January 2012.

Then in August of that year she had such bad pain that she could barely breathe.

An ultrasound revealed the devastating news that she had secondary liver cancer.

“To start with I didn’t tell anyone it was terminal,” says Fred.

“Richard was with me when I got the diagnosis, so he was the only one who knew.

“I didn’t want other people’s pity – I wanted to be treated normally.

“But with the chemotherapy, I was getting so ill and I think Richard thought we needed to give people a chance to say goodbye.

“When we told out daughter, Dayna – I can just remember her howling,” she says through tears.

“Dayna has been my saving grace. Richard has been really strong and been right beside me through everything, but I wanted to see Dana grown up and get married and do all the normal things.”

After six rounds of chemotherapy, which had shrunk the cancer by 20 per cent, her doctors said that

there was no point in continuing with it as it was no longer having any effect, and she was put onto a

programme of hormone control medication to slow the cancer’s growth and pain relief.

Her friends later said that she had seemed so ill that they expected to loose her before the end of 2012.

But Fred wasn’t ready to give up.

Initially she researched private medical options to treat the cancer but was told that they weren’t an option.

It was then that she began researching alternative approaches.

She tried switching to a vegan diet, cut down on sugar, alcohol and processed foods and increased her vegetable intake with a lot of green juices.

She heard about a centre located in Europe, which Frances got in touch with.

“There are an awful lot of quacks out there and I knew I was vulnerable – I was desperate. It must have taken six to nine months for me to trust them enough to say that I wanted to go and stay there,” she says.

In January 2014, in preparation for going to the centre, she came off her medication completely.

“I was on two lots of drugs to stop my hormones, two for pain, stuff to make you poo and stuff to stop you pooing,” she says.

“It was a bit of a leap of faith. I think quite a few people were worried but the hospital had said there was nothing else they could do for me.”

Her daughter and husband supported her decision to try something different to fight the cancer, and Richard stayed with her at the centre for three weeks, while she went for a month.

“We learnt about clean eating and clean living – de-stressing. I was starting to feel more hopeful. I was in a much better state when I came home.”

Today, Fred and Richard follow a ‘clean eating’ diet, which includes organic meat, eggs and dairy, a lot of vegetables and no sugar, alcohol or processed food. All food is cooked from scratch and as much as possible is eaten raw. She also takes a number of supplements, including a high dose of vitamin D.

Fred says that it’s become almost a full-time job.

She doesn’t know for certain what has happened to the cancer as she won’t have a CT scan, as she has concerns about their safety and feels it would set her back if she was told that the cancer was still there.

This means that she has had to adjust to living with uncertainty.

But she definitely feels much better and says that friends and family say that she looks healthier than she has in years.

Since they discovered she had secondary cancer, she and Richard had been making short term plans, going on holidays with friends and family, to create some happy memories.

But it was when she realised that they were talking about buying a house in France in the future that Fred realised they had started making longer term goals.

“It’s quite weird,” she says. “It makes me think ‘have we really been through all this?’.

“I’m in a good place now. When I was on chemo, I felt like I was dying. The oncologist probably still thinks I am dying. But I’m now living not dying. Having cancer has never made me feel more alive.

“I now understand and listen to my body, I fully respect my body.

“I have had a complete lifestyle change and feel healthy as a result. I took responsibility for my own health and have never regretted it.”