LONDON: Reality television star Jade Goody, who has terminal cancer, is to get married on Sunday, having made up her mind to “walk down that isle”.
The 27-year-old mother-of-two, who was told last week that she has just months to live, has left London’s Royal Marsden Hospital in a wheelchair to exchange engagement rings with her lover Jack Tweed, 21, on the banks of the river Thames.
Goody’s friend and publicist Max Clifford said, “I spoke to Jade and it is all on for Sunday.”
The couple are hoping to get married at the plush Down Hall country house, in Hatfield Heath, Hertforeshire - a hotel housed in an Italian-style mansion dating back to 1322. Goody told The Sun: “I am going to die in this hospital, so I don’t want to get married here.
“But wherever we tie the knot, I’m determined to walk down that aisle.”
She said she has “lost my balance”, which the doctors were not sure was a sign of her illness or just general weakness.
“But I’m hoping I will have the strength to walk on my big day. It would be so cruel to be robbed of that one last thing as well,” she added.
Goody and Tweed visited the upmarket Harrods store, where the bride-to-be picked out a wedding dress, a gift from the store’s owner Mohamed Fayed.
“This has given her something to think about, a happy event,” Clifford told Sky News. “The wedding, the christening of her two boys, these are all positive things to focus on as opposed to the cancer and what is happening to her and what she is going through.”
Clifford said the star also picked out Armani suits for her two sons, Bobby, five, and Freddie, four.
Goody, who became embroiled in a race row with Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty in January 2007, was diagnosed with her cervical cancer last August, which has since spread to her liver, bowels and groin.
Meanwhile, hospitals in the country are seeing a surge in testing for cervical cancer due to the so-called “Jade Goody Effect”, reports said yesterday.
According to the Guardian newspaper, multiple hospitals had conducted an increased number of cervical cancer smears in recent months, after Goody was told in August that she suffered from the disease.
“We have definitely seen an increase in uptake due to Jade Goody,” Robert Music, director of the cervical cancer group Jo’s Trust, said. “The fact that it is in the news a lot of the time clearly makes a difference.”
University Hospital Lewisham in south London had carried out 21% more tests since Goody found out she had cancer, compared to the same period a year earlier, The Guardian reported. – Agencies
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