Trisha Goddard said she has opted for ‘life-prolonging’ care…
INDEPENDENT
Trisha Goddard has revealed that her breast cancer has returned 16 years after her initial diagnosis, and disclosed that it is incurable.
In 2008, the 66-year-old British TV presenter was diagnosed with, and recovered from, breast cancer.
Goddard, who now lives in Connecticut in the United States and presents a weekly eponymous show on TalkTV, discovered 19 months ago that her cancer had returned, this time to her right hip.
In an interview with Hello magazine, Goddard revealed she had been diagnosed with stage four secondary breast cancer, which relates to a cancer that started in the breast and has moved to another part of the body.
“It’s not going to go away,” said Goddard. “And with that knowledge comes grief, and fear. But I must keep enjoying what I have always enjoyed.”
Goddard said she had been keeping her secondary diagnosis a secret, but decided to make it public because the secrecy became a “burden”.
“I can’t lie…I can’t keep making up stories,” she said. “It gets to a stage, after a year and a half, when keeping a secret becomes more of a burden than anything else.”
The presenter’s secondary diagnosis was discovered when she noticed she had been incurring injuries doing sports activities and went to the doctor. She used to do weight training in the gym three times per week and regularly went ice skating and running.
Goddard then had a serious fall when she was running up the stairs in her home.
“I was upside down, my legs behind me, and clinging on to the bannister. I went to move my leg – and I’m not a wimp – but I’d never felt pain like it. I now know it was shattered,” she says.
The TV personality was taken to hospital, where a doctor disclosed that they found cancer cells in her right hip.
“That was the first I heard that the cancer had come back. And the first thing I asked was: ‘Am I going to die?’” said Goddard.
She was treated with daily radiation for three weeks and weekly chemotherapy for four and a half months. Hoever, she said she has since opted for “life pro-longing care” for her incurable diagnosis.
“When you go to the doctors in the States, there’s a choice of three little boxes you tick for treatment of stage 4 cancer,” she said. “One is cure, one is life-prolonging and one is palliative. There’s that awful feeling when you’re sitting there thinking: ‘Which one?’ And mine is life-prolonging.”
Goddard added that while she has chosen to make her diagnosis public, she does not want to become what she describes as “a poster girl for cancer”.
“It’s not who I am. It’s not why I’m here,” she said.
“Also, I didn’t want to read words like ‘dying’ and ‘terminal’ or ‘battling’,” she said. “Or ‘inspirational’, because it’s all b******s.”
The journalist added that she was reluctant to make her diagnosis public because she feared she would lose her job or be viewed as a “frail little thing” by others.
“My worry is that people will start seeing me as a frail little thing, and that if [the news] got out, I’d be judged, or people would change the way they are with me, or that I wouldn’t work,” she explained.
“I’m a journalist; I don’t want to be ‘the story’. I don’t want to be interviewing someone and for them to say to me: ‘I’m so sorry.’”
Goddard was the first Black British female presenter to have a daytime talk show in the UK. Her show, Trisha, was aired on ITV in the mornings from 1998 to 2004, before moving to Channel 5, where it was broadcasted until 2010.
