Davina McCall shares touching gesture made to her kids before brain tumour surgery
Davina McCall has revealed the heartbreaking preparations she made before undergoing surgery for a potentially life-threatening cyst in her brain. The former Big Brother presenter told how she write personal letters to her three children before going under the knife.
Davina explained to podcaster Steven Bartlett that she had been warned about the potential dangers of brain surgery: “When I'd spoken to the doctors, they talked about things like stroke, epilepsy, these being risks.
“Nicking an artery or a blood vessel in the brain and having a bleed... so there were a lot of things that could be a risk”
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Davina told how an unscheduled health scan had revealed a potentially deadly colloid cyst within her skull. She revealed in an Instagram video: "A few months ago, I did a menopause talk for a company and they offered me a health scan in return, which I thought I was going to ace. But it turned out I had a benign brain tumour called a colloid cyst, which is very rare - three in a million."
She told fans: “I realised that I have to get it taken out. It’s big for the space – it fills the space. It’s 14mm wide. And it needs to come out because if it grows it would be bad.”
But there were inevitable risks associated with the surgery too, so Davina had an emotional heart-to-heart with her partner Michael Douglas about how to prepare for the worst.
The presenter added : “I talked to Michael about my wishes. I wrote letters of wishes to all the children, and put those in my will.”
She told how she had even named the unwelcome stranger growing inside her skull: “I called my brain tumour Jeffrey.
“We had a Jeffrey happy birthday party with friends. Michael played the piano and sang some songs and sort of did speeches. And we all kind of talked about things and I talked about the fact that I was a bit scared, but I thought ‘I know I'm going to do it.
"And if it was going to happen to anybody, it was good it happened to me because I am robust mentally and I can handle it.’”
While Davina had come to terms with the dangers ahead, she was deeply concerned about her children: “Davina: It was funny with Chester because he's the youngest. He's eighteen. And it was only when I came home, he was like, ‘I didn't realise how serious it was.’
"I said, ‘Well, I'm pleased, you know, because look, here I am and it all went well and it was fine." But in a way, there was part of me that was thinking, ‘If it hadn't been fine, he would have struggled the most.’”
As she doctors prepared to anaesthetise the TV favourite, Davina thought about the impact on her family of the worst were to happen: “Weirdly, I'd thought about it so much that actually my final thought about it was that they're surrounded by love and family and Michael, but also they're really great kids.
"I just thought, ‘You guys... it will be devastating, but you will all be okay.’”
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