Ruth Walker: ‘She’s remarkable, inspiring friends to do remarkable things’

IT'S Friday afternoon and a bunch of Edinburgh girls are at the airport, heading for Copenhagen. It's not a hen weekend, this expedition. Nor is it a birthday blowout, though they have all been buffed and burnished in preparation. All those handsome Scandinavian men, you see. A girl likes to look her best.

Back in Edinburgh, I'm partaking of a ritual that is about as unfamiliar to me as a cheery tune is to Coldplay, but it's one I could grow to like (not Coldplay – I could never like them under any circumstances). I'm having lunch. No microwaved mulligatawny wolfed down in the soulless space formerly known as the office canteen today. I'm having a proper three-course affair. With wine and everything. I am what I believe is known as a Lady Who Lunches. For one day only. Ching.

Over in Copenhagen, our girls are being put through their paces, doing all the last-minute stuff they have to fit in before running 26.2 miles through the scenic streets of the Danish capital in its 32nd marathon. Lisa Stephenson would love to be there too; in fact, it's because of her that they're there in the first place. Instead, she's having lunch with me ... and a small but select band of around 500 other women.

Stephenson was only 41, a wife, a mother to two young children, and with a busy job in banking, when she received a call last April. The person on the other end asked her to come to hospital. It must have been something to do with the health check she'd had the other week, she reasoned.

But that Easter weekend everything changed. Without any warning or any symptoms bar a touch of anaemia, she was diagnosed with myeloma, a cancer of the blood's plasma cells. There is no cure.

There followed chemotherapy, long hospital stays and an excruciatingly painful bone marrow transplant. The results, so far, are unsuccessful. One wet Monday, when she was at her most hopeless and helpless, Stephenson walked into Maggie's centre in Edinburgh. She says it was like walking into the sunshine. For the first time since her diagnosis, people understood how she felt. More than that, she felt this place could help make her better. So when her friends asked what they could do to help, she said, “Help me by helping Maggie's."

Her first event raised £19,000. Soon she reached her target of £50,000. Friends have gone on sponsored cycles and swims, sold books, run marathons. Her current total is £61,000, and her new target is £100,000. Her website is www.lisaschallengeformaggies.co.uk.

For now, the future is uncertain. New drugs might provide a cure, but in the meantime she's living a remarkable life, inspiring friends to do remarkable things. She finishes her story with a song – ‘I Will Survive.’

I've never run for charity before. It always seemed enough as a personal challenge, the sense of achievement sufficient reward. But next time, I want to do it for men and women like Stephenson, people who, in the midst of illness and hardship and pain, show the rest of us what it really means to live.