Yahoo News Love Island's Jack Fowler reveals he was temporarily paralysed in secret health battle
Love Island star Jack Fowler has shared that he was left temporarily paralysed at the beginning of the year during a secret health battle.
The 24-year-old made the revelation while speaking on the Oxford Union podcast as he described social media as "absolutely fake" while explaining how he put up holiday pictures on Instagram as he battled the illness, transverse myelitis, in private.
He remarked: “Instagram, social media is absolutely fake. At the start of this year — no one knows this — I had something called transverse myelitis.
Read more: Love Island’s Marcel says he ‘nearly died’ after illness left him hospitalised
“I lost all movement in my legs and my left arm, paralysed, I was in a wheelchair for two or three weeks."
Transverse myelitis is when the spinal cord becomes swollen and inflamed which can damage the messages spinal cord nerves send throughout the body.
Fowler, who appeared on the fourth series of the ITV2 dating show, went on to detail that while he was struggling behind closed doors he portrayed a very different life on social media.
"On my Instagram I was having a wicked time, I was having a great time. I was in Dubai, I was in Thailand for all of the two weeks because that’s the ’gram making it look like that.
"But realistically, I wasn’t — I was going through the hardest time of my life,” he shared.
The NHS website states an attack of transverse myelitis can be a one-off event or can involve relapses.
It comes as Fowler has recently voiced his support for the Black Lives Matter movement in an emotional post to Instagram as he shared a picture of his father, whose parents hail from Saint Helena.
The footballer said he had sometimes been treated differently in his life due to having a black father, and that it “hurt” to see black people facing inequality in 2020.
He added: “I feel as a white looking mixed race man, I’ve experienced many moment of white privilege. It’s times like these that we should treat people of all colour, religion and walks of life equally.”
