Winning the Miss Slinky 2005 title at a Preston slimming club has helped put back the smile on Wendy Robinson's face after she ballooned to 12-and-a-half stone following years of chemotherapy treatment for cancer.

Wendy, 37, won the dieting accolade six months after joining Longton Slimming World group.

Before signing up to shed the pounds the mum-of-one had already dropped nearly a stone and was 11 stone 8lbs.

Weighing nine stone, she piled on the pounds after being diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia in November 1998.

Her son, Jamie, eight, had just turned one when Wendy and husband Craig, 32, discovered she was pregnant with a second child.

A couple of months into the pregnancy, however, Wendy miscarried the baby and was told she had the blood cancer.

Over the next nine months Wendy had five courses of chemotherapy at the Royal Liverpool Hospital and was told she was unlikely to ever have any more children.

But about 18 months later, while in remission from the disease, the couple discovered Wendy was expecting for the third time.

Their happiness was short lived, however, after a routine blood test revealed the cancer had returned.

This time doctors told Wendy, from Hesketh Bank, that she could die if she continued with the pregnancy and advised her to have a termination.

Wendy's 13 week pregnancy was aborted and she started off down the chemotherapy road again until a bout of pneumonia and an infection halted the treatment and put her in intensive care. "My husband was told that I had six hours to live at most," she said.

But Wendy pulled through and was given radiation to kill off infected bone marrow and then received a bone marrow transplant.

Now in remission, she joined the slimming club last May, and won the award after losing one stone 12 lbs.

"It's really good to get," said Wendy. "But I'm not brave or courageous. You just take what life throws at you and get on with it. Life is not a bed of roses."