UnTouchableStories
People who are known for something else, saying what happened to them or to someone they love. Every story here was shared publicly by the person themselves, and every one of them lists its sources.
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All 37 stories
Tulisa
Tulisa was acquitted, and that was when the depression started
Content note — this story covers a subject some people would rather choose when to read.
Tulisa dates a major depression to the moment her public life came apart. She had spent her whole life working towards the position she was in — she says the thought of getting there was what had carried her through depression and anxiety as a child — and then, in what she describes as half a second, it was gone. She knew straight away that how she was seen had changed permanently. She uses the word tarnished. She was charged. She was acquitted. She says being acquitted is not much use when your life is already in tatters, and that she was grateful for the result and still could not shake what followed it. The processing only began afterwards, because while it was happening there was no room for it. She was then a key witness in a further case, and describes still being followed, still having attempts made to set her up, and living in a state of hypervigilance and fear for another year — three years altogether rather than one. That, she says, is when the depression, the anxiety and the PTSD properly set in. It is also when she made suicide attempts. This page is not going to describe them, and there is nothing here about how. What she chose to talk about is what happened next: a friend worked out that something was wrong, came to the house, found her and called an ambulance. She lived. She says she was angry to wake up, and afterwards did not want to know anything about it — she did not talk to that friend about what she had found until years later. She has since thanked, publicly, the person who stepped in. She has written a book about all of it, and says finishing it is the reason she is still here: that people go through long dark stretches convinced there is no light at the end, and she wants it read by someone in exactly that position. Nothing here is medical advice. If any of this is close to home, the numbers at the end of this page are free, and they are there in the middle of the night.
Penny Lancaster
Penny Lancaster was believed the first time. The second time she told nobody for years
Content note — this story covers a subject some people would rather choose when to read.
Penny Lancaster was twelve, in her school uniform, when a man followed her on the way to school and assaulted her. She ran straight to the headmaster's office and told them what had happened. They believed her. The police were called that day. Weeks later the police came back. From her description they had worked out that the same man was behind a number of attacks on girls, and that she was the oldest of them, and so the best witness they had. She was driven out before dawn on a winter morning and parked in a police car outside a suspect's house, and she watched him scrape the ice off his windscreen while the officers waited. She could not be certain it was him. She says nobody put her under any pressure, but she could tell what they were hoping for, and she would not name a man she was not sure about. He was never caught. She has lived since with not knowing how many others there were. Afterwards, nothing was dealt with. Her parents were protective, her father drove her to school every day, the police and her teachers were kind — and so, she thought, it was fine. Nobody then understood what something like that does to a child, and she says it has stayed with her. Years later, working as a model, it happened again. This time it was a client she had worked for before and had no reason not to trust. She was drugged. She says she was not conscious and not aware of what was happening. She pulled herself together, went on to the event she was booked for, remembers little of it, went home and felt sick to her stomach — and when her parents asked the next day how it had gone, she said nothing. She decided it would be buried and go to her grave. She was not thinking of it as a crime she could report, and she did not want to put her parents through it a second time after what they had been through when she was twelve. It came out decades later, and by accident. Filming a television programme with police officers, working on a case not unlike it, she mentioned it in passing — matter-of-factly, she says. The officer stopped her. He told her she had just reported a crime, that it did not matter how long ago it happened, and that they should take a statement. She said no. Asked why, she says she did want him to pay for what he had done, but that he was an old man by then and she believed no longer a danger to anyone, and the people who would suffer were his wife, his children and his grandchildren. She has had one session of therapy. It lasted three hours, she cried through it, and she has not been back — she says she was looking after too many other people at the time, including a husband who was seriously ill. She says she will get round to it. She is a special constable now. She says that through her modelling years she watched out for the other young women in the room: staying in it, holding the door. Nothing here is medical advice. You do not have to report anything to the police to get help, and it does not matter how long ago it was. The support at the end of this page is free, and some of it is open day and night.
Spencer Matthews
Spencer Matthews stopped drinking for someone else, and then for himself
Content note — this story covers a subject some people would rather choose when to read.
Spencer Matthews says he had big problems with alcohol. He was, by his own account, a very heavy drinker — he talks about a bar bill at the end of one television show that came to most of his fee, and about paying for everything so that people would keep drinking with him. He started drinking regularly at around fifteen. His brother had died on Everest when Spencer was ten, and he says some therapists believe his drinking was, at least in part, trauma he had never processed. He is openly unsure about that. He says he was always slightly uncomfortable putting the two things together, because he enjoyed drinking to excess and nobody made him do it. Both halves are his, and this page leaves them where he left them. He describes his years on Made in Chelsea as a stretch of hitting self-destruct on purpose, partly to dramatise things, and says he now talks about that man as a former self he has nothing in common with. The drinking was worst, he says, when he was bored — between television jobs, waiting for something to land rather than going after it. He stopped for a fortnight before the final of a televised ski jumping show, because he wanted to win. Then he stopped properly. He says that was initially for the woman he later married — not at her request, but because he could see the relationship slipping and could see her losing interest if he did not change something about his own health. He says it became for him almost immediately, and that he had no idea what it would do to the rest of his life. He drinks now, a great deal less. Asked directly whether a person can go from drinking heavily to drinking moderately, he does not offer it as a method. He says that with what he calls an addictive nature it is a slippery slope and always will be, and that what is different now is the size of what he would lose: a business, a marriage, and children who have never seen him drunk. He founded a non-alcoholic drinks company in 2018, and describes falling head over heels into it instead. That is worth knowing while reading the rest: he has a commercial interest in people drinking less, and this page has no connection to it. Nothing here is medical advice. His account of cutting down rather than stopping is his own, and is not being put forward as a route anyone else should take. The NHS says it can be very dangerous to stop drinking suddenly if you are dependent on alcohol. There is help at the end of this page, and none of it costs anything.
Jo Malone
Jo Malone lost her sense of smell during treatment, and told nobody
Content note — this story covers a subject some people would rather choose when to read.
Jo Malone was thirty-eight and working on a shoot when she noticed a tiredness that was not normal. She went back to the hotel, had a shower, and found a lump. It did not hurt, and it moved. She had it looked at when she got home. Her doctor wanted it scanned. She said she was going to a party that evening; he told her the scan was happening now. At the scan she remembers the nurse's face, and the nurse excusing herself and saying she would be back in a second, and knowing then. Seven days of further scans followed, which she describes as horrendous — every machine asking the same question, which was whether it had spread. At the end of that week she was told she had a very aggressive breast cancer, and that she needed a lumpectomy straight away. She flew to New York the next morning, on the advice of Evelyn Lauder — who she describes as the woman behind the pink ribbon breast cancer campaign, and who told her that sometimes the sweetest thing in your life comes wrapped in bitterness. She had the lumpectomy the following day. Seven days after that she was called with the results: ductal carcinoma in situ, and she was told that even with the lump taken out it would come back, so she would need a mastectomy. Her husband fell on the floor. Her own first response was to tell them to run the test again, because they had it wrong. She was operated on a week later, and afterwards went into what she describes as severe depression and anxiety. She did not want to talk. She did not want to see her son. She looked at her body and thought she would never be attractive again, never be a woman again. Chemotherapy began almost immediately and went on for about a year and a half. She lost her hair in the first round and says that was the point she felt stripped of everything she was. Every seventh day her white cell count fell and she was back in intensive care. She got shingles, and, in her words, everything else going. Her husband did not leave her side. Near the end of it she found something in the other breast and had to go through all of it again. Her reaction the second time was not the same as the first. Take it off, she said. She was not going to spend her life wondering. What she told nobody, through all of it, was that the treatment was taking her sense of smell. She could feel it going. She was ashamed — she was Jo Malone, she had built a global fragrance company, and she could not say it out loud. She says cancer does that to people: it shames you, and tries to make you feel you are not worth it. She has been clear for twenty-one years. She says she has never let cancer be the book. It is a chapter, boxed, and she is not frightened of it any more. A few months before this interview she learned something she had not known at the time. The doctor who treated her in New York came to dinner and told her that on the standard chemotherapy of the day she would not have survived, and that he had put her on a protocol that was new then — one that gave chemotherapy far more often than was usual — along with a small number of other women. She says all of them are alive, and that the protocol is ordinary treatment today. She had not known any of that while it was happening, and says there would have been no point telling her, because what it would have taken away was hope. Nothing here is medical advice. That last part is her account of what her doctor told her many years afterwards, and it is not something this site can check; no treatment described here is being put forward as one that works, and decisions about treatment belong with an oncologist. The NHS says to see a GP about a lump or swelling in the breast, chest or armpit, or any change in your breasts or nipples that is not normal for you. It also says these symptoms are very common and often caused by something else, and that finding cancer early may mean it is easier to treat.
Delta Goodrem
Delta Goodrem woke at 3.31 in the morning certain something was wrong
Content note — this story covers a subject some people would rather choose when to read.
Delta Goodrem was eighteen. Her first album had gone to number one at home in Australia and stayed there for months, she had just taken a third number one single, she had debuted at number two in the UK, and she was booked on a flight to the United States. She had also been unwell for a while, in ways that were easy to put down to the schedule. Rashes. Night sweats — something she says she only understood the significance of later. An exhaustion she kept overriding, because she is not someone who surrenders easily, which she says has been to her detriment. When she saw a doctor she was told it was stress, and she understands why: she was flying to Britain for a weekend of television and flying back to be on set. Then she found a lump in her neck. Small enough that you could not see it, she says — you could only feel it. It grew. One night she woke at 3.31 in the morning soaked through, frozen with fear after a nightmare. Her first thought was that someone had broken into the flat, that there was danger in the room. She rang her mother, then a friend, then the runner from the set. She told all of them the same thing: something is going to happen to me. They told her she was tired. She said no, she was very scared. She later wrote a song called 3.31. Her mother and her manager booked her in at the hospital for the Monday. On the Sunday she was on the front page of the national paper for the first time. On the Monday she went in on her own, and fainted during a biopsy needle into her neck. She says she saw it in the doctor's face before anyone said anything — that he knew. That evening there was a knock at the door and her mother and her brother walked in. She asked what was wrong. That was the first time she heard the word cancer. She had surgery the next morning. There was a mass in her neck, and she says it had spread beyond it. Within days the news was out — somebody at the hospital had said something — and by the Friday she had to make it public. Camera crews sat outside the family home. Letters arrived in numbers she still talks about. A stranger flew in from Hobart, knocked on the door with a cake, and was let in by mistake. Elton John rang her on her first day of chemotherapy to wish her luck, and she says you never forget people who are kind to you when you are that far down. She kept a diary through it. What it says, she says, is that she felt trapped — like an animal backed into a corner with nowhere to go, just shaking. She describes lying awake in the middle of the night trying not to fall asleep, in case something happened. At the ARIA Awards that year she collected the statues she had dreamed about all her life. It was the first time she had seen herself with no hair. She wore a blonde wig. Nothing here is medical advice. The NHS lists a painless lump or swelling — most often in the neck, armpit or groin — as the most common first sign of Hodgkin lymphoma, and night sweats among the others. It says these symptoms are far more often caused by something else, and to see a GP if you have them, because the earlier it is found the better treatment tends to work.
Sophie Ellis-Bextor
Sophie Ellis-Bextor read a passage in a pregnancy book and recognised herself
Content note — this story covers a subject some people would rather choose when to read.
Sophie Ellis-Bextor was twenty-four and pregnant for the first time. It was a low-risk pregnancy, midwife-led — the kind where you go in occasionally and they say they will probably see you towards the end. She did not feel right. Her ankles swelled, she had headaches, and she describes not looking like herself and not wanting to see people. What she concluded was not that something was wrong, but that she was bad at being pregnant. She had always wanted a baby, and here she was finding it hard. At a check-up on a Friday a midwife told her that her blood pressure was a bit high, gave her tablets, and asked her to come back on the Monday. That weekend she went to a christening, and the mother-in-law of a friend told her she did not look well. Her reaction was relief. She says she wanted to hug her — finally someone had said it. The night before the Monday appointment she was reading a book about pregnancy and reached a short passage about pre-eclampsia. She started crying. She was, she says, pretty sure that was her. She was right. At the appointment she was told she was not going home and not packing a bag. She was taken straight to a hospital with a neonatal unit and told she would be having her baby in days, not weeks. She was thirty-one weeks pregnant. She describes being somewhat in denial — being shown around the unit where her baby would go, and thinking that none of it would really happen. Her son was born that Friday. It happened again in her second pregnancy, nearly five years later, and it arrived differently. No headaches that time and no swelling, just her blood pressure. She found out close to by accident: she was due to fly abroad for a gig and needed a letter from her consultant to travel. The consultant checked her and told her she was not flying anywhere. That baby was born nine weeks early. Before her third pregnancy she asked whether it was likely to happen a third time, and says she was told that having had it twice does not mean you are expected to have it again. She carried that pregnancy to full term, and says the thing she could not believe was being handed the baby straight away, because with the first two she had not been able to hold them. Looking back, she says it is quite wild that she simply went: okay, next time. Nothing here is medical advice. The NHS says pre-eclampsia usually causes no symptoms you would notice at first, and that it is normally picked up through the blood pressure and urine checks at routine antenatal appointments — which is much of why those appointments matter. It also lists having had pre-eclampsia in an earlier pregnancy among the things that raise the risk of getting it again.
Ella Mills
Ella Mills spent most of a year in bed, taking 25 medications a day
Content note — this story covers a subject some people would rather choose when to read.
Ella Mills was twenty and halfway through university when she became ill. She was diagnosed with postural tachycardia syndrome — PoTS — along with other conditions affecting her autonomic nervous system, the part of the body that runs the things nobody thinks about: heart rate, blood pressure, digestion. What it meant day to day was that standing up was hard. She describes her heart rate climbing to between 150 and 180 beats a minute when she stood, while her blood pressure fell, leaving her too dizzy to move. Around that came chronic fatigue, brain fog, IBS, acid reflux and other digestive problems, repeated infections, headaches, pain across her body, and a growing sense of depression and anxiety. She spent most of the following year in bed or unable to leave the house. At the peak she was taking twenty-five different medications a day, and says none of them made a difference she could feel. In May 2012 she changed what she ate, and started writing about it. The blog became Deliciously Ella and then a food company. Her health, she says, stabilised, and she has been off medication for more than eight years. That is her account, in the order she tells it, and this page does not go further than that. Nothing here is medical advice, and none of it is evidence that changing a diet treats PoTS. The NHS says PoTS has no cure and is managed rather than fixed — more fluid, smaller meals with less carbohydrate, compression clothing, and for some people medicines, worked out with a GP. Anyone thinking about stopping a medicine they have been prescribed should speak to the doctor who prescribed it.
Kimberly Wyatt
Kimberly Wyatt told someone as a child, and was not believed
Content note — this story covers a subject some people would rather choose when to read.
Kimberly Wyatt was sexually abused as a young child. She said clearly that she did not want to go into detail, and this story does not. What she did describe is the shape of it. It was not her immediate family but relatives who were close to them, living in the same farmhouse, in a place cut off from everywhere else. She was, in her word, vulnerable — a child in a room down the hallway. It happened more than once, and not only with one person. The part she returned to was not the abuse. It was telling someone. She built up the confidence to speak about it as a child, and she was not believed. She describes that as consistent — that the people who felt safe to trust turned out not to be, and that when she was honest about it nothing changed. Looking back, she is not sure her parents had it in them to deal with it or protect her the way she needed, and she thinks that is because of hurt in their own lives. She says she has found a way to accept that. Where it went instead was dance. On stage, she says, everything she did had something behind it, and nobody watching knew: she was living out something true that she had no other way of saying. She describes it as therapeutic — a place for what she was not being listened to about. She now runs a dance academy and works with children who have been bullied, or are neurodivergent, or simply feel they do not fit. What she tells them is that a wider well of experience is something an artist can draw on, and that finding forgiveness can make it a tool rather than a weight. That is how she holds it. It is not advice, and nobody has to arrive at it. Nothing here is medical advice. If any of this happened to you, support is listed at the end of this page — and it does not matter how long ago it was.
DJ Fat Tony
DJ Fat Tony's mother found him unconscious. He was diagnosed that day
Content note — this story covers a subject some people would rather choose when to read.
DJ Fat Tony had been in denial for a long time when his mother came to his house on a Tuesday and found him unconscious on the kitchen floor. She got him to hospital. He tested positive for HIV there and then, and they kept him in. He says he wanted to go home, and did not have the strength to go anywhere. He was in hospital about four months. By the time he was diagnosed the infection was very far along — he was told he had probably been living with it for around a decade, his viral load was enormous and his T-cell count had fallen below a hundred. He was put in isolation, in a room where staff came in wearing masks. He was also coming off drugs at the same time, which he thinks made the deterioration worse. The infection reached his brain. After repeated lumbar punctures he became ill enough that doctors put him into an induced coma to bring the swelling down. He was in it for months. He remembers coming round with his mother holding his hand and not understanding what had happened, and being told over time that he had pneumonia and had nearly died. What he says next is the part that matters most. It did not stop him. He came out of hospital and went straight back to his old life, thinking that since he had not died that time, he would die the next. He says he never dealt with any of it and carried on using because of the shame attached to it — and that he used the word HIV rather than AIDS because it sounded nicer. Asked how the shame gets smaller, his answer was simply: by talking about it, and making it open. He says he had not discussed it with anyone before he put it in his book. Nothing here is medical advice. HIV treatment today is very effective, and someone on treatment with an undetectable viral load cannot pass the virus on. Support for anything in this story is listed at the end of the page.
Ruby Wax
Ruby Wax started HRT early, and says she never really had a menopause
Ruby Wax's account of the menopause is short, and mostly about not having had one. She started HRT early — as soon as she was suspicious, before symptoms really arrived — because, she says, she does things early. She is the sort of person who asked to be cut open rather than go through labour; she had one contraction and decided that was enough. The upshot, as she describes it, is that she never really went through the menopause at all. What she is less certain about is stopping. She does not know whether she ever will, and she is only half joking when she says God help her when she does. She says she was told HRT could only be taken until 55, and does not believe that is right. She credits it with her bones and her brain being in good shape — and then, immediately and unprompted, took it back. She cannot say her brain is good because of HRT, because she has no idea what her brain would have been like otherwise. That hedge is hers, not ours, and it is the most useful thing in the passage: one person's experience of a treatment is not evidence about what it does. Nothing here is medical advice, and nothing here is a recommendation for or against HRT. How long to take it, and when to review it, is a conversation for you and your GP.
Kate Nash
Kate Nash was 17, deciding between surgery and no surgery, and couldn't decide what to have for dinner
Content note — this story covers a subject some people would rather choose when to read.
Kate Nash had heart palpitations through her teens, and for a long time there was a reasonable explanation for them. She is asthmatic and used a reliever inhaler, which can cause palpitations, and her mother — a nurse — told her that was probably what it was. It was not an unreasonable thing to say. It was also wrong. What changed it was someone else nearly dying. A girl at her school became critically ill with a heart problem, and it shook the whole community. The next time Kate mentioned palpitations her mother felt her chest, found her heart racing, and took her straight to hospital. ECGs followed, and a diagnosis: supraventricular tachycardia. She was sixteen or seventeen, at the BRIT School, vaguely thinking about university. A doctor sat her down and gave her survival percentages, and what might happen later — a pacemaker, a stroke, a heart attack — and what the surgery involved, and left her to weigh the risk of having it against the risk of not. She describes being unable to decide what she wanted for dinner, let alone that. She says she numbed out. Her mother was furious with the doctor for putting statistics like that in front of a teenager. In the end she did not have to choose. She had been told that palpitations plus chest pain meant hospital. It happened at school, and her first instinct was to hide in a room and wonder whether she was making a fuss. A deputy head found her crying there and took her to A&E. Things got bad enough that the procedure was no longer optional. By then she had been rejected by every university she applied to and was working at a fast food chain. She took time off from that job to have heart surgery. She was awake for it — catheter ablation is done that way — and could feel the tubes moving up through her veins. What she remembers most sharply is not fear of dying but teenage mortification at being seen naked by a room of adults. Afterwards, lying alone in a hospital bed, still bloodied, she decided she was not going back to that job. Nothing here is medical advice. If your heart keeps racing like this, the NHS advice is to see a GP — and to call 999 if an episode lasts longer than usual or comes with chest pain, breathlessness or fainting.
Beverley Knight · on someone they love
Beverley Knight on Tyrone, and the Christmas she drove him to hospital
Content note — this story covers a subject some people would rather choose when to read.
Beverley Knight met Tyrone in their late twenties, at an R&B night in a London club. He spotted her, wanted her to perform at an event he was booking, and asked for her number. They had lunch the next day and, as she tells it, were inseparable from then until he died. By the time they met he was already a long way into living with HIV, and had been in hospital several times. At Christmas 2002 he became very ill. She noticed his speech slurring and his vision going — he needed glasses, and he began to sound drunk, which she knew he was not. His body seemed to be shutting down. She left her parents over the Christmas period, got in her car and drove him to hospital in west London, where he was admitted. The consultant told them the prognosis was poor. He would not survive it. Treatment might extend his life by a couple of months; without it, he was looking at perhaps a couple of weeks. Tyrone said he did not want treatment. What she says about that is short and unguarded: she had to accept it, and it nearly killed her. She was there when he died — in the next room. He died in 2003. It happened at the same time as she was promoting an album that was being rejected by people she had expected to understand it. She describes facing that without the person she would have leaned on, and everything spiralling from there. Tyrone was not a public figure. He is named here only as she names him, and nothing has been added to what she said. Nothing here is medical advice. HIV treatment today is very effective: someone on treatment with an undetectable viral load cannot pass the virus on. If you want a test, the NHS can arrange one, and results take days at a clinic or minutes with a home kit.
Sarah Hiscox
Sarah Hiscox was eight when a doctor first prescribed her sleeping pills
Content note — this story covers a subject some people would rather choose when to read.
Sarah Hiscox was eight years old, and not sleeping. Her mother took her to the local doctor, and the doctor prescribed Mogadon — a benzodiazepine sleeping tablet strong enough, as she puts it, to knock out a horse. She was a small child. Speaking to Davina McCall, she was clear that she did not go looking for it and her mother did not question it. A doctor had sanctioned it, so it must be all right. In her house, she says, pills were simply everywhere and helping yourself to them was normal, which is part of why none of this struck her as remarkable until she sat down to write a book about her life and started remembering. She was prescribed them for about a fortnight. She notes that current guidance measures courses of sleeping tablets in days rather than weeks, and that two weeks is a long time. When the course finished the nightmares came back. By twelve or thirteen she was taking pills she found in the family bathroom cabinet after school — sitting there, as she describes it, alongside the ordinary contents of any bathroom. She says she was addicted to them by thirteen, and that when they ran out she became physically ill and had no idea why. Nobody had told her that stopping could do that. It did not end there, and she has written about where it went. What she returns to is how early it started, how ordinary it looked from the inside, and how long it took her to see it — which is most of the reason she decided to write any of it down. Nothing here is medical advice. If any of this is familiar, support is listed at the end of this page and none of it will ask you to explain yourself first.
Richard Bacon
Richard Bacon on an ADHD diagnosis at 42, and the drinking he has not stopped
Content note — this story covers a subject some people would rather choose when to read.
Richard Bacon was diagnosed with ADHD at 42. Speaking to Elizabeth Day, he connected it to something he had lived with far longer: he describes himself plainly as an addict. What he says he learned is that a lot of people with ADHD use alcohol or stimulants to compensate for how their brain is working, often without knowing that is what they are doing. He counts his own history in that — and is candid that he still drinks, still daydreams about stopping, and finds it hard because he likes it, while saying it has caused him a great deal of trouble. He also describes the trap of believing he works better after a couple of drinks, and says out loud that this is a dangerous way to think and is not true. He describes having had a brain scan at a private clinic in the United States which he was told showed unusually slow blood flow to his prefrontal cortex — a dark patch, as he puts it, that made his ADHD visible. It is worth being clear about how ADHD is actually identified here: the NHS describes diagnosis as an assessment by a specialist, looking at your history going back to childhood and at how the traits affect work, study, relationships and health. It is not made from a brain scan, and no imaging test is used to diagnose it in the UK. What comes through is a man who found a framework late that made a chaotic history legible to him — the risk-taking he enjoyed, the scattered focus, the hyperfocus — and who is still, by his own account, in the middle of the harder part. Nothing here is medical advice. If ADHD traits are affecting your studies, your work or your relationships, the NHS advice is to see a GP.
Alexandra Burke
Alexandra Burke was trying to leave hospital when she lost her sight
Alexandra Burke was very ill during her second pregnancy with pre-eclampsia, and it was not caught early. She has described it as dangerous for her and for the baby, and she had to deliver a month early. The part of her account most worth reading is what she was doing when it became an emergency. She was due to have her baby shower on the day she ended up delivering. The hospital wanted to keep her in and she did not want to stay, so she tried to discharge herself. Then, suddenly, she could not see. She had a migraine and could not open her eyes. Seven or eight nurses came in, kept her on the bed and told her she could not leave and would have to deliver within twenty-four hours. Her own reaction at the time, she says, was that they were all being dramatic. She did not know. Losing your vision is not a detail. Blurred vision or flashing lights, and a severe headache that painkillers do not touch, are among the symptoms the NHS says to get medical advice about straight away in pregnancy. She only found out how ill she had actually been about three months before this interview, when she asked her husband directly — she was cleared, past it, and thinking about another baby, and she wanted to know. He told her it had been bad enough that he would be content for them not to have any more children. She says she thinks she had been in some denial about it at the time. She is now hoping to try for another child. Nothing here is medical advice. If you are pregnant and have any of the symptoms above, the NHS advice is to get medical advice immediately — do not wait for your next appointment.
Natalie Imbruglia
Natalie Imbruglia on an ADHD diagnosis, and deciding the label mattered less than the tools
Natalie Imbruglia was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, and what she says about it is unusual: she is not especially interested in the label. She thinks she is also mildly dyslexic, though she has not been diagnosed with it. She describes words moving around on the page, reading three pages and going back to the start, and not being able to remember what she had just read. As a child she concluded she was stupid. She says that is the hard part of not knowing — everyone around you says you are struggling a bit, and nobody says there may be a reason. She now talks about dyslexia as a kind of lateral thinking and a different way of seeing, while being clear that it does not feel like that when you are young. She had also long described herself as having OCD, in the loose way people often do. As a child she was extremely tidy and organised — she once put a piece of string down the middle of the room she shared with her sister. She says she liked having it, and used to tell everyone. What changed with the diagnosis was not the traits but how she holds them. She came to understand that the things she had filed under different labels were part of one picture, and that she had a little of each. Her conclusion was that you can get caught up in which name applies, or you can accept a sprinkling of all of them and get on with it — because what actually matters is the tools you have to cope. That is her way of holding it, not advice. Nothing here is medical advice, and a diagnosis does open doors to support that self-description does not. If ADHD traits are affecting your studies, your work or your relationships, the NHS advice is to see a GP.
Lady Gaga
Lady Gaga on chronic pain, and naming it fibromyalgia
Lady Gaga named her condition herself, on her own Twitter account, on 12 September 2017. She wrote that the chronic illness and chronic pain she deals with in her documentary is fibromyalgia, and that she wanted to help raise awareness and connect the people who have it. Four days earlier she had talked about the pain itself, without naming it, at a press conference in Toronto for the film. Asked what it had been like to open up about chronic pain on camera, she said it was hard, and that it was liberating too. She said a strong part of her believes that her pain does her no good unless she turns it into something. She said she hoped people watching who live with chronic pain would know they are not alone, and that the film would point them towards help — for chronic pain, and for anxiety and mental illness as well. She also talked about shame: that there is a degree of self-deprecation and shame that goes with being in pain a lot. She said she wanted anybody who assumes that a person who dances and sings could not possibly be living that way to know that she struggles with the same things, that she works through it, and that she does not have to hide it. Two days after naming the condition she wrote again, asking for people's grace and understanding and promising she would come back and perform soon. A run of European concerts was postponed. Nothing here is medical advice. Fibromyalgia affects people differently and no single treatment works for everyone. The NHS says to see a GP if you think you have fibromyalgia.
Selena Gomez
Selena Gomez on lupus, failing kidneys and a transplant
In October 2017 Selena Gomez talked to the American programme TODAY about the kidney transplant she had had that summer, and about the lupus that led to it. She had already told people it had happened, on her own Instagram account the month before. She said she had arthritis and that her kidneys were shutting down, and that her way of coping had been simply to keep going — she had not realised how much it was affecting her body. By the summer she had reached a point where, as she described it, it had become a matter of life or death. She said she had not wanted to ask anybody in her life for help, because the thought of asking someone for something like that was very difficult for her. She described what happened around the operation. She woke up afterwards, saw her family, went back to her room, and then began hyperventilating with a great deal of pain. Surgeons had to take her back in: an artery had turned, and she said that second operation lasted six hours where the usual procedure takes about two. She said she was very thankful that there are people who know what to do in that situation. Recovery, she said, meant bed rest, an hour of walking a day, no stairs, and constantly needing to ask for help with ordinary things — she gave washing and dressing as examples. She called it a brutal process. In a longer version of the same interview she said the surgery has left a permanent change to her body that she is aware of and that has changed how she dresses. She said she had chosen to make a private story public in the hope that it would help other people, and pointed at simple things anyone can do, including giving blood and putting yourself down as an organ donor. Nothing here is medical advice. Lupus affects people very differently, and most people who have it never need a transplant. The NHS says to see a GP if you often get symptoms of lupus.
Michael J. Fox
Michael J. Fox on being told at 29 that he had Parkinson's
Michael J. Fox has talked publicly for years about being told, at 29, that he had Parkinson's disease. In a radio interview with Howard Stern he described his first reaction as refusal — this was not supposed to be happening to a man in the middle of his career, and he was not an eighty-five-year-old man. He said the doctor told him not to worry, that he had about another ten good years of work left in him. He described the time that followed as being stuck in the middle of the road with cement feet, hearing a bus coming without knowing how fast it was travelling or how hard it would hit. He did not tell the public straight away, and said that when it became known everyone had an opinion about it. That, he said, helped him work out that the only opinion that mattered was his own. He described going to Congress early on to give evidence about funding for Parkinson's research and deliberately not taking his medication first, because he wanted the people deciding to see what the condition does to a person. He has also been open about coping badly at first. He said he began drinking heavily and alone, then stopped, went through about a year with nothing to put in its place, and later went into therapy — after which it started to become clear to him that this was not a death sentence and that he could live a day at a time. Speaking to CBS Mornings in 2023, more than three decades on, he said his positivity is sincere but hard won, and that as someone with an athlete's ego and bravado he hid his fear for a long time and is now more open with himself and his family about the days when he is struggling. The programme said he was diagnosed in 1991 at 29, has lived with the condition for more than half his life, and that the foundation he set up in 2000 has funded close to two billion dollars of Parkinson's research, including a study that identified a protein in spinal fluid that can help detect the disease, in some cases years before the first symptoms appear. Nothing here is medical advice. Parkinson's affects different people very differently. The NHS says to see a GP if you are worried that you may have symptoms of Parkinson's disease.
Angelina Jolie
Angelina Jolie on a faulty BRCA1 gene and the surgery she chose
In May 2013 Angelina Jolie wrote a newspaper article about her own health. She said she carries a faulty version of a gene called BRCA1, which sharply raises the risk of breast cancer and ovarian cancer, and that she had decided to have a preventive double mastectomy. She wrote that her doctors had estimated her own risk at 87 per cent for breast cancer and 50 per cent for ovarian cancer, and she was careful to add that the risk is different for every woman. Once she knew that was her reality, she wrote, she decided to be proactive and reduce the risk as far as she could, starting with her breasts because her risk there was the higher of the two. She described a course of surgery that ran over three months and finished on 27 April 2013, and said she had been able to keep it private and carry on with her work while it happened. She wrote that she did not feel any less of a woman, that her children could see her small scars and nothing that made them uncomfortable, and that her estimated chance of developing breast cancer had dropped to under 5 per cent. Her reason for writing, she said, was that other women might benefit from her experience. She encouraged every woman, and particularly anyone with a family history of breast or ovarian cancer, to seek out good information and medical experts and to make her own informed choices. Twelve years later she returned to it. In an interview published by TIME France in December 2025 she showed the scars from that surgery publicly for the first time, and said she shares them with many women she loves and is always moved when other women share theirs. Asked whether BRCA testing should be offered to every woman, she said each woman should be able to decide her own path and have the information she needs to choose, that genetic testing and screening should be available and affordable for women with clear risk factors or a significant family history, and that access to screening and care should depend neither on money nor on where someone lives. Nothing here is medical advice. An altered gene is not a diagnosis, and Breast Cancer Now is clear that it does not mean someone will definitely develop cancer. If breast or ovarian cancer runs in your family, or you have noticed a change you are worried about, see a GP.
Venus Williams
Venus Williams on Sjögren's syndrome, and how ill she had to get before anyone looked
In June 2022 Venus Williams posted a video on her own YouTube channel about living with chronic illness. She said she was diagnosed in 2011 with Sjögren's syndrome, an autoimmune condition, and that she lives with it every day. She explained what it does. The symptoms it is known by are dry eyes and a dry mouth — those, she said, are what set it apart from other autoimmune conditions — and alongside them come the joint pain and fatigue that autoimmune conditions tend to bring. For her the dryness means contact lenses are not an option. She said it can get bad enough to cause mouth sores, and that some people have their tear ducts plugged, because eyes that dry run constantly. The part she kept returning to was how long it took to find out. She said autoimmune conditions are tricky to diagnose and that people wait around seven years on average, and that she was squarely inside that window. She went to doctors and told them she did not feel well. Somebody whose living depends on knowing her own body said something was wrong, and it was not until she was too ill to carry on playing professionally that she got an answer. Helping other people get diagnosed and treated sooner is now one of the things she says she wants to do. She talked about what it took from her career. She had to stop altogether and was out of the game for around nine months, and before that she had struggled to play her best without knowing why — frustrating, she said, when you hold yourself to a standard you can no longer reach. She described flare-ups: stretches where you are more or less all right, then a marked drop into intense joint pain or fatigue. The things she says help her are ordinary ones: drinking enough, sleeping enough, eating well, having her blood checked, and learning to pace herself rather than pushing until she crashed and could not get up. She was careful to say twice that she is not anyone's doctor and is only describing her own experience, and that the first step is seeing a doctor and getting a proper diagnosis. She finished on the part nobody sees. She looks well, she said, and people who look well get told they cannot be ill. You do not need everybody to understand, but you do need the people close to you to, because you can look fine and not be fine. She pointed viewers towards the Sjögren's Foundation. Nothing here is medical advice, and what one person finds helpful is not a recommendation for anyone else. The NHS says to see a GP if you have symptoms of Sjögren's syndrome and they are affecting your daily life.
Padma Lakshmi
Padma Lakshmi on twenty-three years of pain, and the doctors who never said the word
Padma Lakshmi was thirty-six the first time anyone said the word endometriosis to her. She had been in pain since her first period at thirteen. That is twenty-three years of losing about a week out of every month. In an interview published in 2015 she described what those weeks were like: doubled over, or running to be sick, unable to walk down the street. She worked as a model, and she learned to book out the week her period was due, because the few times she worked through it were not worth it. She got by on hot tea, heating pads and hot water bottles, kept her prescriptions filled, tried acupuncture, tried anything. She knew when it was coming and battened down the hatches. What she did not have was a name for it. Her mother is a nurse and her father worked in the pharmaceutical industry, and health was talked about openly at home — but her mother had had the same pain, and had been prepared by her own mother to accept it, and so passed the same understanding on. Some women get cramps and some do not. Once you are told there is nothing to be done, she said, you become resigned to it. She had good insurance. She went to her check-ups. She was examined regularly by gynaecologists in several different cities over many years. They offered her painkillers, or asked whether she wanted to go on the pill. Nobody ever suggested going in and looking, or taking a biopsy, or finding out whether there was tissue there that needed removing. She was on the pill through most of her twenties and came off it at thirty, and the pain came back hard enough to put her in an emergency room. A doctor found ovarian cysts and operated to take them out. He still did not say the word. She was also clear about the cost that is not pain. Endometriosis arrives with puberty, she said, so it shapes how a girl comes to see her own body. While everyone talks about blossoming into a woman, what she felt were explosions in her abdomen. And it is isolating — not because she was ashamed in front of her mother, but because nobody wants to ring a teacher or a boss and say they cannot come in because of their period. So you say nothing, and the absences stack up unexplained. It was only after she recovered from surgery that the size of it landed. For the first time since she was thirteen she found out what an ordinary month felt like, and then she got angry. One week in every month for all those years came to about a quarter of her life: second and third dates she never went on, exams and school dances and volleyball games she missed, jobs she lost, times she could not be there for her family or her friends. None of it recoverable. That anger is why she co-founded the Endometriosis Foundation of America. The foundation's work with teenagers started from her own memory of being one — she did not want to go to a gynaecologist at that age, and said she still does not much want to now. So the first line was school nurses, and the foundation has presented to every public high school nurse in the five boroughs of New York. Then she went into classrooms herself, talking to boys and girls together, because the boys turned out to ask thoughtful questions and not to be squeamish if you get to them early enough. What she wants is for this to be as ordinary to talk about as a mammogram or a prostate check. What she tells girls who find her is that they are not alone, that it has nothing to do with anything they did, that it is not being a sissy about pain, and that they do not have to buck up and take it. Endometriosis is something a person manages for as long as they have it. But you cannot manage a thing nobody will name. Nothing here is medical advice, and one person's account is not a guide to anyone else's illness. The NHS says it can take a long time to diagnose endometriosis, and to see a GP if you think you might have it or if your symptoms are affecting your everyday life, work or relationships.
Brooke Shields
Brooke Shields on postnatal depression, and being told it was just the baby blues
Content note — this story covers a subject some people would rather choose when to read.
In May 2007 Brooke Shields spoke at a press conference in Washington DC in support of a proposed American law on postnatal depression, which would have put federal money into education, detection and treatment. She used it to describe what had happened to her after the birth of her daughter. The worst of it, she said, was that she did not know what she had. She could not hold her baby, or look at her, or kiss her, or sing to her. If she stayed close to her she went weak at the knees and felt she might faint. She cried constantly. And still it did not occur to her that this was postnatal depression, because that was not something that was going to happen to her. What she had instead was a conclusion. She had made a terrible mistake, she was an incapable mother, and her daughter and her husband and everyone around her would be better off without her. She was clear about how it felt from the inside: not dramatic, not hysterical — clear and rational, the obvious thing to do. She had begun to think about ending her life. She described an early appointment where a doctor asked how she was doing and she told him the truth: that she could not do this, that she had changed her mind, that the baby could not stay with her, and would he please help her not do this. She said she was told it would be fine, that his wife had been through the same thing, that it was the baby blues and hormones, and that it would pass soon. She was told not to worry. She went on to write a book about it and to campaign for the condition to be taken seriously. Six years later, in an interview with Marlo Thomas, she came back to the same ground. The most frightening part, she said, was looking at her daughter and feeling nothing at all — feeling she could walk out of the room and never come back and the baby would be better off. She said depression is persuasive because it is tailored to the person it happens to: you ask yourself the questions and you get back answers that sound true. And she said the reason it stays unspoken is shame. We are told that having a child and loving it is the most natural thing in the world, so a mother who does not feel that assumes she has failed rather than that she is ill. What she wanted from saying it out loud, in both, was that a woman going through it should not believe she is the only one it has ever happened to. Nothing here is medical advice. The NHS says postnatal depression is common and usually gets better with treatment, and that you should speak to a GP, midwife or health visitor if you think you may have it — even if only some of the signs fit.
Emilia Clarke
Emilia Clarke on two brain aneurysms, and the week she could not say her own name
Content note — this story covers a subject some people would rather choose when to read.
In March 2019 Emilia Clarke wrote a first-person essay for The New Yorker about two brain aneurysms she had survived. She said she had never told the story publicly before. The first was on the morning of 11 February 2011, a few weeks after she finished filming the first series of Game of Thrones. She was working out at a gym in north London, already fighting a headache and a heavy tiredness, and while holding a plank she felt something she described as an elastic band tightening around her brain. She made it to the toilets and was violently sick. A woman in the next cubicle helped her into the recovery position and an ambulance was called. At the Whittington Hospital nobody yet knew what was wrong, so she could not be given anything for the pain. A scan found a subarachnoid haemorrhage — bleeding into the space around the brain, caused by a ruptured aneurysm. She was moved to the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in central London and had three hours of surgery to seal the aneurysm off, reached by a wire threaded up from an artery in the groin rather than by opening her skull. She was twenty-four. She was past the two-week mark when a nurse asked her name as part of a set of cognitive checks and she could not produce it. What came out was nonsense. She had aphasia, caused by the damage to her brain, and for someone whose whole working life was language it was the thing she feared most. It lasted about a week. She was in hospital for a month. While she was still there she was told there was a second, smaller aneurysm on the other side of her brain. It might stay quiet indefinitely, so it would be watched. She went back to work. She described filming the second series exhausted and unsure of herself, taking morphine between publicity interviews, and being convinced for a long stretch that she was going to die. In 2013, after the third series and while she was performing on Broadway, one of her regular scans showed the second growth had doubled in size. The operation she was told would be simpler went wrong. She woke screaming; there had been a large bleed, and surgeons had to go back in at once, this time through her skull. Parts of it were replaced with titanium. She came out with a drain in her head and a scar running from her scalp to her ear. That recovery was harder than the first — a month in hospital, anxiety and panic attacks, and weeks she says her mind has since blocked out. She wrote that she has healed far beyond what she expected, and that she helped set up SameYou, a charity working on recovery from brain injury and stroke. She was also careful to say she knew how lucky she had been, both to live and in the care she was given. Nothing here is medical advice. The NHS says a headache that is extremely painful and does not go away, weakness on one side, slurred speech or loss of sight are reasons to call 999.
Alanis Morissette
Alanis Morissette on postnatal depression after each of her three pregnancies
Content note — this story covers a subject some people would rather choose when to read.
Alanis Morissette has talked openly about having postnatal depression after each of her three pregnancies. She has described it as something she came to expect and to prepare for, rather than something that took her by surprise the second and third time. She has drawn a distinction between the episodes. The first two, she has said, were more about depression: feeling everything very deeply, and days after the birth when she could not bring herself to leave the house at all. The third was more about anxiety, and about intrusive thoughts — thoughts that arrive uninvited and will not go. She has called those thoughts horrible. She has spoken about the sleeplessness, and about carrying on while feeling unable to. She has described pushing through it because her children needed her, and wanting to keep things looking as ordinary for them as she could. Asked what actually helps, she has given a short and unglamorous list: being medicated, being honest about how she is, and having a few people close to her who understand well enough to say that her mood going up and down is not a crisis. She has said she was taking an antidepressant at the time of one interview. She has talked about knowing, from having been through it before, roughly what to expect: that in her experience it lasted around two years, that it is postnatal depression and not a permanent state, and that there is an end to it. She has also said that after the first time she went into the later pregnancies expecting it, and ready to try whatever might help. Nothing here is medical advice. Postnatal depression is different for everyone, it is treatable, and a GP, midwife or health visitor is a good place to start.
Bruce Willis
Bruce Willis's family on his frontotemporal dementia diagnosis
Content note — this story covers a subject some people would rather choose when to read.
On 16 February 2023 Bruce Willis's family published a statement through the Association for Frontotemporal Degeneration, a charity whose work is supporting people affected by the disease and funding research into it. This story is written from that statement. They wrote that they had announced a diagnosis of aphasia in the spring of 2022, that his condition had progressed since then, and that there was now a more specific diagnosis: frontotemporal dementia. Difficulty with communication, they said, is only one of the symptoms he faces. They described the new diagnosis as painful, and at the same time as a relief, because it was finally a clear one. Much of the statement is about the disease rather than about him. They called it a cruel illness that many people have never heard of and that can happen to anyone. They noted that it is the most common form of dementia in people under 60, that reaching a diagnosis can take years, and that it is therefore probably far more common than the figures show. They wrote that there are no treatments for it today, and said they hope that changes. They were explicit about why they were making it public. They asked that any attention go towards awareness and research rather than towards him, and wrote that he had always used his voice to help other people and to raise awareness of things that mattered. If he could respond himself, they said, they believe he would want to bring attention to the disease and to connect with other people living with it. They pointed readers towards the charity for information and support. They ended by asking for compassion, understanding and respect, so that they can help him live as full a life as possible. Nothing here is medical advice, and nothing here is an update. The statement is from February 2023, and we have added nothing to it.
Shania Twain
Shania Twain on Lyme disease, and the seven years before anyone could explain her voice
Shania Twain has said she was bitten by a tick while out horse riding in a forest, and that this is how she caught Lyme disease. Her voice changed afterwards and she could not rely on it. She has described it failing without warning, with no control over her breath. It took about seven years, she has said, before a doctor was able to work out what was behind it: nerve damage to her vocal cords, caused by the infection. For most of that time she believed she would never sing again, and she has said she had come close to accepting that. She has talked about what a damaged voice does to an ordinary day. She started avoiding the phone. She started avoiding anywhere with background noise, because speaking over it was too much effort. She has described that as debilitating, and has said a voice is a large part of how any of us express ourselves — more so for a singer. She decided to have open-throat surgery, which she has said was frightening and a risk she chose to take. She has described supports being fitted to stabilise the weakness in her vocal cords, and has joked that they will still be there long after she is gone. Her voice is different now, and she has been clear that it will never be what it was. Speaking is the harder part: it turns hoarse and she has to adjust as she goes. Singing, she has said, is easier, because there is more projection in it, and she has described the voice she sings with now as having more power and more character than she expected. She has said she loves it, and that she is grateful. Nothing here is medical advice. Lyme disease and its after-effects differ from person to person, and any decision about testing, treatment or surgery belongs with you and your clinical team.
Patsy Kensit
Patsy Kensit on a PTSD diagnosis that finally explained the sadness
Content note — this story covers a subject some people would rather choose when to read.
Patsy Kensit was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder about three and a half years before this interview. She also lives with depression — something she finds hard to square with being, as she puts it, a very joyful person who is grateful for the life she has had. The sadness is there anyway. For years she assumed she knew where it came from. She put it down to relationships that had not worked out, and to not having built the family she wanted. What was put to her instead was that it went back much further — to her childhood. She was six when she was told her mother was going to die. By the time she was eleven or twelve she had been to the hospital perhaps a dozen times to say goodbye, and each time her mother came through it. She describes her mother as an extraordinary woman who stayed relentlessly positive through cancer, and who died when Patsy was in her early twenties, around her first son's first birthday. She says she misses her every day. At seven or eight she had a phrase she used to repeat — that she was having a bad thought. Her mother would tell her to cancel it and not to worry. She also remembers deciding, as a child, that if she worked and earned money she might be able to buy her mother's health back. What she says about the diagnosis itself is the part worth reading twice. It was a relief. She had wondered whether she was bipolar, or had ADHD, and finally having a name for it explained everything — that what she had carried was not about those relationships at all, but about things that happened when she was very small. Therapy over the years has helped, though she is not in it at the moment. She says she has been dealing with this all her life, and that it is good people can talk about it now without being written off as unable to work. Nothing here is medical advice. If you think you may have PTSD, or treatment you are having is not working, the NHS advice is to see your GP.
Jessie J
Jessie J found a lump, was told it looked fine, and asked again
Jessie J was 37, and days from returning to music after four years away, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer last March. The part of her account worth reading twice is how it was found. She felt a lump and thought it did not feel right, so she went to be looked at. The ultrasound came back clear — everything looks fine, she was told. She did not leave it there. She mentioned an achy arm, and waking up with pins and needles, and asked whether any of that meant anything. On the strength of those symptoms they did a biopsy. She said the first person she phoned was her mother, and what she said was that she could not die, because she has her son. She had a mastectomy on her right breast in June, and documented it for her followers, because she is, in her words, a sharer, and she thinks these things need talking about. She has said she was very lucky to find it so early and that it was not invasive, and that she knows there is a chance it could come back — but until then they are living life. Her own advice, at the end, was to trust your instinct: you know your mind and you know your body. Nothing here is medical advice. If you find a lump or notice a change, the NHS advice is to see your GP.
Christina Applegate
Christina Applegate on living with MS, and the night a room stood up
Speaking to Robin Roberts at length for the first time about her multiple sclerosis diagnosis, Christina Applegate did not soften it. She said she lives kind of in hell, and that she is not out much, so even doing the interview was difficult for her system. She talked about presenting at the Emmys, and the standing ovation that met her. She said she more or less blacked out — people told her afterwards she had been funny and she had no memory of what she said or did, because she got so overwhelmed she no longer knew what was happening. She said she felt beloved, and that it was a beautiful thing. Her humour was intact: she told the room they were shaming her with her disability by standing up, and then added that the audience had stood for everybody. She appeared alongside a friend who has lived with MS for far longer than she has, and the two of them, at different stages of the same disease, support each other. Nothing here is medical advice.
Céline Dion
Céline Dion on the condition she says will always be with her
Céline Dion told Vogue France about living with stiff-person syndrome, the rare neurological condition she announced she had been diagnosed with in 2022. It affects roughly one person in a million and causes muscles to go rigid. She was direct about where she is with it. She has not beaten it, she said — it is still within her and always will be. She hopes research will one day find a cure, but for now she has to learn to live with it. Five days a week she has athletic, physical and vocal therapy. She has said she had been dealing with problems with her health for a long time before the diagnosis, and that facing them has been really difficult. When she announced it in 2022 she said the spasms affected every aspect of her daily life, and stopped her using her vocal cords to sing the way she was used to. She postponed her Las Vegas residency and her tour, and has not performed a full show since 2019. In February she made an emotional return to a stage, walking out with her eldest son beside her. Asked whether she would perform again, she would not put a date on it. Her body would tell her, she said — but she does not want to simply wait. Nothing here is medical advice.
Caprice Bourret
Caprice Bourret on the headaches that started after a minor accident
Caprice Bourret was in training for a televised winter sports show when she had what she described as a very minor accident. The headaches started straight afterwards. Then her vision went — she said she was seeing ten of everything. She wanted to carry on. There was a live show that night and she kept insisting she was fine. It was the production's health and safety rules that made her see their doctor, and she has since said that the show she had been mocked for doing is the reason she is alive. The doctor sent her for a battery of tests and a full body scan. At the hospital a nurse told her she was fine, and then told her she needed to see the neurosurgeon. She was on her own when the neurosurgeon sat down and told her she had a brain tumour. She did not know at the time what benign meant, or whether what she had was cancer, and she has described that not knowing as the frightening part. A second full body scan checked that nothing had spread. She was then told it was benign — but that it was growing, and had to come out. The operation took seven and a half hours, with eleven people in theatre. Afterwards staff checked on her every twenty minutes. She now has, in her words, a bionic skull. She told almost nobody while it was happening. She told her partner, and she told her children she was going away for work, and she has said she got through it without a support system because she had not let anyone in. Speaking a month after the operation, she said it was the first time she had really talked about any of it. Nothing here is medical advice. If you have a headache that feels different from the ones you usually get, or headaches that are getting worse, the NHS advice is to see your GP.
Davina McCall
Davina McCall on the brain cyst a routine scan found, and deciding to have it out
Davina McCall's colloid cyst was found by accident. She had been talked into a head-to-toe health scan — she was fit, her blood pressure was low, and she expected, in her words, to ace it. The scan found a benign cyst in the middle of her brain. She heard the word benign and stopped worrying. It was not cancer, she had probably had it since birth, and she believed she had no symptoms. It took some persuading to get her to have it looked at properly. A neurosurgeon showed her the picture and named it: a colloid cyst, something that affects around three people in a million, and always in the same place — the third ventricle, in the middle of the brain. That space is finite. Once a cyst fills it, growing any further means causing damage: hydrocephalus, a build-up of fluid on the brain. Very rarely, it can cause sudden death. She was told she might simply not wake up one morning. What she found hardest was that nobody would tell her what to do. It might grow; it might never grow. She could leave it and watch. She described the feeling of something having taken control of her life, and of being angry at being made to feel in danger every day. She chose surgery, and chose a surgeon who proposed the larger of two approaches. Part of her reasoning was timing: she was 57, and would rather have the operation while she was otherwise fit than face it in her late sixties, or as an emergency somewhere far from home. She was told the risks included stroke, epilepsy and bleeding. Before the operation she put her will in order and wrote personal letters to her children. Nothing here is medical advice. A colloid cyst found by chance is not necessarily one that needs treating, and that decision belongs with you and your clinical team.
Eric Dane
Eric Dane on ALS, one functioning arm, and the time he has with his daughters
Eric Dane spoke to Diane Sawyer about living with ALS — amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the most common form of motor neurone disease — in his first interview since going public with the diagnosis. It began with something small. About eighteen months before the interview he noticed weakness in his right hand, and put it down to too much texting or simple fatigue. He saw a neurologist, who sent him to another neurologist. It was nine months before he was diagnosed. By the time he spoke to Sawyer, he said, his right side had stopped working completely and he had one functioning arm. He said he expected to lose the use of his left hand within a few months. He talked about what the diagnosis means for his family — that there is a good chance he will be taken from his daughters while they are still young — and about his wife Rebecca Gayheart, from whom he separated in 2018 and with whom he has since reconciled. He described her as his biggest champion and said they have become better friends and better parents. He said what he wants now is to spend time with his family, to work a little if he can, and to tell them he loves them every day. He also said he does not feel this is the end of him, and that he is fighting as much as he can. The programme also spoke to a doctor who is not treating him, who set out that the disease is progressive, that its pace varies a great deal between people, that there is no cure, and that some treatments can slow it. Nothing here is medical advice.
Ethan Zohn
Ethan Zohn on itchy skin, two stem cell transplants, and getting back to the game
Ethan Zohn won Survivor: Africa in the early 2000s. In 2009 he was 35, a former professional footballer, training for the New York City marathon, when he was diagnosed with lymphoma. What he noticed first was not a lump. He was exercising every day and his skin was intensely itchy. It was around four months after that itch began that a swollen lymph node appeared in his neck, and scans found a mass in his chest measuring six centimetres by twelve. He had lost his own father to colorectal cancer when he was fourteen. He has said doctors could not tell him why he, or so many others, developed lymphoma. His treatment ran to several rounds of chemotherapy, twenty-two rounds of radiotherapy and a stem cell transplant. Twenty months later, the cancer came back. What he credits for the remission that followed is a targeted therapy that had newly become available, together with a second stem cell transplant — this time using stem cells donated by his brother. At the time of this interview he had been in remission for nine years, and had gone back to compete on Survivor: Winners at War. He has said that while he was ill he dreamed and prayed he would live long enough to play the game again. He now speaks publicly during Blood Cancer Awareness Month. Nothing here is medical advice. If you have a lump, itchy skin, night sweats or unexplained weight loss, the NHS advice is to see your GP.
Jamie Laing
Jamie Laing on nine years of tinnitus, and learning not to fight it
Jamie Laing went on This Morning to talk about the tinnitus he has lived with for nine years, and the programme opened by playing the sound he hears. It started overnight. He woke one morning to a high-pitched ringing and searched the whole house trying to find what was making it, before realising the noise was inside his own head. He has described that realisation as genuinely frightening. He was later diagnosed with tinnitus and told there was no cure. He puts his own tinnitus down to never having protected his hearing — loud music and nightclubs when he was younger, with no ear protection — and now encourages other people to look after theirs. He said it gets louder when he is anxious, stressed, overworked or overtired, and that the more attention he pays it the louder it seems. Rather than fight it, he has come to treat it as what he called a really annoying friend: when it gets loud, he takes it as a signal to ask which of those things is going on. He was clear this is what has worked for him, not advice for anyone else. It has had hard stretches. Filming Celebrity Hunted, in a loud and stressful environment, it got bad enough that at times he could hear little except the ringing. He cannot sleep in silence, and uses a fan, white noise, whale sounds, or an audiobook to have something else in the room. The part he kept coming back to was how isolating it is, because nobody else can see or hear it. He said talking about it changed things for him — a friend turned out to have it too — and he invites people going through it to message him rather than sit with it alone. He appeared alongside a doctor, who set out the treatments and support that exist. Nothing in this story is medical advice. If tinnitus is affecting your sleep, concentration or mental health, the NHS advice is to see your GP.
George Clarke · on someone they love
George Clarke on his mum, and the two times encephalitis took her from them
Speaking on the Great Company podcast, the YouTuber George Clarke described his mother's two episodes of encephalitis — inflammation of the brain — and what each of them left behind. The first, he said, was mostly physical. She was on crutches for around a month, her memory came back, and within a couple of weeks she was largely herself again. The second was far harder. He was about to leave for a hockey camp when his father went upstairs to check on her one more time and found her having a seizure. She went to hospital by ambulance, was put into an induced coma, and was kept on life support for about a week. The family visited every day for around three months. She was back on her feet within roughly three weeks, but this time what the illness took was cognitive rather than physical: a large part of her long-term memory had gone, including the death of her own father, which had to be broken to her again. He said his mother has permanently lost her sense of taste and smell, that her sense of direction is affected — in a restaurant she picks out landmarks on the way to the toilet so she can find her way back — that her sleep is disturbed, and that loud noises startle her badly. What he kept returning to was how little she makes of any of it. When she came out of hospital, he said, the first thing she did was apologise to the family for what she had put them through. George Clarke's mother is not a public figure. She is not named here, and nothing is published about her beyond what her son chose to say publicly himself.