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The SNP rival in Jo Swinson’s constituency has told how a personal battle with cancer has fuelled her determination to protect our NHS.

Amy Callaghan, 27, credits the health service with saving her life after she was diagnosed with skin cancer when she was a teenager.

And she believes the NHS would not be safe in Swinson’s hands.

She said: “If I can take anything away from having cancer, it’s that it ignited a fire in my belly and a strength in me that I will use to fight for our NHS. It must be protected at all costs.

“I value the NHS and want to protect it and I want to stand against everything that Jo Swinson has done in terms of damaging our health service. The thought that the NHS could end up in private hands terrifies me.”

The SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Green Party last month voted in favour of Labour’s motion to safeguard the NHS from being sold off to US corporations in a Boris Johnson-Donald Trump trade deal.

While the Tories voted against it, the Lib Dems , including the party’s leader Swinson, abstained.

Amy said: “Jo Swinson had a chance to protect our NHS and she sat on her hands. That was appalling. All that I hold dear, she is willing to throw away. I won’t let that happen.”

Amy is a tireless campaigner who has refused to allow her devastating illness define her – and it has energised her fight to topple Swinson in East Dunbartonshire.

(Image: PA)

She was 17 when a mole on the left-hand side of her face, there since the age of five, began to change shape.

When she went to see her GP, her concerns were dismissed as vanity. But her parents pushed for a second opinion and Amy was referred to a dermatologist.

The mole was removed but two years later, in 2011, she was applying sun cream to her face and noticed a lump on the inside of her left cheek.

She was referred to Glasgow’s Royal Infirmary and although it was not initially concerning, the mole was surgically removed.

When she emerged from the anaesthetic, her plastic surgeon told her the lump had been more sinister than he had hoped.

Two days later, she sat with her parents as they were told it was melanoma – cancer which had penetrated her bone, her muscle and her nerves.

Surgery followed and the nerves from the left-hand inside of her face were removed – and the sensation with it.

Her bone was drilled, part of her cheek bone removed and muscles manoeuvred to get as much of the tumour out as possible. The surgery left her physically and emotionally scarred.

For a young girl who had been soaring academically and was a social butterfly, the impact of the illness was traumatic.

She said: “I was 19 and I’d been on an incredible high, I’d come out of school at the top of my game and was flying at university. Life was going incredibly well then cancer turned my life upside down. The ground disappeared from under me and I fell dramatically.”

After treatment, she was given the all clear but with the terrifying caveat that the cancer had an 80 per cent chance of returning within two years.

She returned to university after a year out and had to reestablish herself while still battling a lack of confidence and panic attacks.

For three years, Amy worked on a collaborative project with Teenage Cancer Trust, CLIC Sergeant and Children with Cancer UK to produce a paper which has now been published by the British Medical Journal.

She hopes it will give the medical profession an understanding of the terrible damage cancer does to mental health.

She added: “We need to recognise that it is OK not to be OK and it is essential to have mental health support there when it is needed.

“I hate that phrase ‘just go back to normal’ when you leave hospital. Normal doesn’t exist after surgery for cancer.

“I used to worry about sleeping in case I didn’t wake up. That’s common for anyone with cancer. ”

In time, she did realign her life. Her grades were soaring, she was sociable and happy again but then the cancer returned.

On a Saturday in January 2014, she found a tiny lump in her cheek and by the Wednesday, was back to see her surgeon.

A relapse was confirmed and, aged 21, Amy was back in the operating theatre.

The tumour was small but invasive, wrapping around nerves and muscle, and the surgery was substantial. When she came round, she couldn’t move her top lip and it took intensive physiotherapy before she could smile again.

(Image: Getty Images)

Amy said: “I thought it was going to be easier the second time around but it was so much harder. When I looked in the mirror, the scar on my face had doubled in size. To me, I looked like a different person.

“For so long after that, you don’t think it’s going to get any better because you’re so engulfed but you do emerge in time.”

“I still don’t think I can smile properly and I have had a scar my whole adult life. Sometimes it’s all I see when I look in the mirror and I am self-conscious when I get photographs taken.

“But my confidence is back and I want to win this election more than anything, to put my constituents first, to fight austerity, protect the marginalised and put bairns over bombs.

“Jo Swinson so casually said she would press the nuclear button. It would give me great pleasure to unseat someone who would do that.”

She cherishes the NHS, her “incredible” consultant plastic surgeon John Scott, Glasgow’s Royal Infirmary and all the health workers who provided her “exceptional” aftercare.

She said: “The NHS is so special, it can never be jeopardised.”