The Crown star Olivia Williams will never be cancer-free because of this reason
Entertainment Hollywood The Crown star Olivia Williams is pushing for accessible early cancer detection methods so that others don't go through what she is experiencing.
Olivia Williams revealed that she will never be cancer-free.
The Crown star recently spoke about her misdiagnosis and what that has led to after years of suffering from symptoms that, if they were detected early on, could have prevented the current therapies she has to undergo. She was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2018 when she was 46, in an interview with The Times.
Olivia is now 56.
Olivia was misdiagnosed
The actress experienced aching limbs, fatigue and chronic diarrhoea for years. She visited 10 doctors in three different countries in search of answers. She was at the time diagnosed with several illnesses, from Lupus to IBS to perimenopause. It was only a doctor in Los Angeles who discovered a VIPoma, a rare tumour, on her pancreas.
She said, “If someone had f------ well diagnosed me in the four years I’d been saying I was ill, when they told me I was menopausal or had irritable bowel syndrome or [was] crazy — I used that word advisedly because one doctor referred me for a psychiatric assessment — then one operation possibly could have cleared the whole thing and I could describe myself as cancer-free, which I cannot now ever be.”
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She revealed that by the time the tumour was removed, it had spread to her liver, “which, as anyone involved in the cancer life knows, is the worst news.”
Doctors now give her “microwave ablation” to treat recurring metastasised cancer cells in her body. She continued: “And it’s like, oh my God, I fell for it again. They’ve found new metastases pretty well either just before Christmas or in the middle of a summer holiday. Then, for three years in a row, they started appearing too close to major blood vessels to zap. So there was a period when we were just sitting and watching them grow, which is a horrible feeling.”
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Olivia Williams has not lost hope though and is now pushing for early detection of cancer for others. “The average time from diagnosis to death [for pancreatic cancer] is three months — and that figure has not improved in 50 years, It takes an average person with my cancer 11 visits to the GP to be diagnosed. For me it was probably about 21 times.”
“Because it’s so quick and so shocking, people tend to liken losing someone to this cancer to losing them in a car crash,” she continued. “What could change that is early detection with a test that could be as simple as breathing into a bag at your GP. We’re incredibly close, we just need to get it over the line.”
