Davina McCall was ‘so angry’ at brain tumour diagnosis
She said that she was told by doctors that ‘very, very rarely’ the tumour can ’cause sudden death’.
Davina McCall says she felt her benign tumour “had taken control of me and I was so angry about that” following her diagnosis last year.
The former host of Big Brother, 57, revealed in November that a colloid cyst had been found after she was offered a health check-up as part of her menopause advocacy work.
She had surgery to remove the tumour, and spent time in intensive care before recovering from home with the help of her partner, celebrity hairdresser Michael Douglas.
McCall told Steven Bartlett on her own podcast Begin Again that after having a scan she was told that it was an uncommon type of tumour, one that “very, very rarely” can “cause sudden death”.
She also said: “I felt like this thing had taken control of me and I was so angry about that. I couldn’t… I couldn’t let it go. (I thought) ‘How dare you control my daily life like this and make me feel every day like I’m in danger?’
“I have newfound enormous sympathy for people who have benign brain tumours. Because you think… I have had so many people say to me: ‘Well, at least it was benign.’ And you think: ‘You have no idea that benign brain tumours can still kill you.’
“It’s just, you don’t know when it’s going to happen. It could happen tomorrow, it could happen in years’ time. It’s different to cancer, but it is also awful. A benign does not mean fine.
“Living with that uncertainty is pretty terrifying. I know enough now to know that, look, I am healthy. I look after myself. I exercise.
“I’ve got all of these things going for me, but stress is a killer. And I want to de-stress my life. I do not want to live with the stress of thinking any minute, you know, I could be taken out by something.”
McCall also said that she “seriously believes wholeheartedly that somewhere in my genetic makeup, this was in my stars from birth, in my brain at birth”, but never thought it was “unfair”.
She also said the experience has “not changed me forever, but I’ve learned things about myself that I would never have learned without this operation”, and added that she thinks in two years’ time she will view it as “one of the greatest blessings of my life”.
The broadcaster also said that she named her tumour “Jeffrey” because she does not have any friends of that name.
She later had a “happy birthday party with friends” for Jeffrey, and felt at the time she wanted to reassure people, and did not “want sympathy” or people to “carry the burden” of her surgery.
When asked about when she spoke with Douglas about death, McCall said “quickly”, because the doctors had warned her about “stroke, epilepsy” and “nicking an artery or a blood vessel in the brain and having a bleed” being a risk during surgery.
She added: “I did go and address my will and make sure that was airtight. I talked to Michael about my wishes. I wrote letters of wishes to all the children and put those in my will.”
Speaking of her children, she said that she wanted to “try and find a way that they would all find a way through if I didn’t make it”.
McCall said: “It was funny with Chester because he’s the youngest. He’s 18, 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.'”
According to the NHS, non-cancerous brain tumours are more common in people over the age of 50, and symptoms include headaches, vision problems and drowsiness, and some can be “difficult to remove without damaging surrounding tissue”.
Chemotherapy or radiotherapy can also be used if the surgery is not successful.
McCall, the host of My Mum, Your Dad, has long advocated on women’s health issues, and presented a documentary called Sex, Myths And The Menopause and another on contraception called Davina McCall’s Pill Revolution.
She became an MBE in the King’s birthday honours for services to broadcasting in 2023 and was given a special recognition award at the National Television Awards for her broadcasting career.
