How a 31-year-old woman is spreading awareness among other cancer sufferers

Now 31, Saima Thompson is juggling a busy working life at the family restaurant, Masala Wala Cafe in Brockley, with encouraging debate about cancer in the black, Asian and minority ethnic communities

Saima Thompson was running a Pakistani restaurant with her mother in southeast London and had started a new bar business with a friend when she began suffering from upper back pain and fatigue.

The diagnosis? Stage IV non-small-cell lung cancer.

She was 29 years old and told she had six to 12 months to live. That was in April 2018 and she is still very much alive and positive even as she undergoes a second round of chemotherapy treatments and takes drugs to manage the pain.

Now 31, she’s juggling a busy working life at the family restaurant, Masala Wala Cafe in Brockley,