Beloved Great British Bake Off presenter Sue Perkins revealed this week that she has been living with a brain tumour.
The TV personality opened up about the tumour, which thankfully is benign but has prevented her from being able to have children, in the new issue of Good Housekeeping.
"I’m lucky that it’s benign so it’s not in itself a worrying thing," Sue said of the growth, discovered eight years ago during a health check-up during filming for another TV show.
"Sometimes it’s big and makes me mad, and sometimes it’s small and is in the background. Sometimes it screws up my hormones. I have various tests now to make sure the side effects aren’t too onerous."
Back in 2007, Sue was filming a show called The Supersizers in which she ate foods from different eras, with doctors conducting tests to see how they affected her body. Luckily this meant the tumour was discovered in good time, as the 45-year-old confesses she had been neglecting her healthy in many other ways.
"I was at a point where I was spending so much of my life doing TV that I only found out about my real life through a television procedure. I didn’t have the time to go to the doctor in real life," she admits.
And while the growth on Sue pituitary gland is not life-threatening, the fact that it has affected the production of various reproductive hormones and in turn her fertility has not been easy to digest. Sue admits that it became particularly tough to cope with when her Bake Off co-star Mel Giedroyc became pregnant for the first time.
"When she [Mel] had her first child I thought: this is an experience I won’t have or share. You’ve gone somewhere I can’t go. You think it is going to destroy something, but actually it hasn’t destroyed anything – we have very different lives and different experiences now."
Sue and Mel's friendship spans 27 years. The pair meeting for the first time while studying at Cambridge University and went on to star in the comedy troupe Footlights together.
"I don't know if I would have gone on to have children," Sue admits. "But as soon as someone says you can't have something, you want it more than anything."
