The 57-year-old former Big Brother host had surgery to remove the tumour before spending some time in intensive care, ITV News Entertainment Reporter Rishi Davda reports
Davina McCall has said she was “so angry” that she felt like her benign tumour had “taken control” of her.
The TV presenter has spoken publicly for the first time about the colloid cyst that was found in her brain during a health check-up last November.
Speaking on her podcast, Begin Again, McCall was in tears as she explained how a scan revealed she had an uncommon type of tumour that “very, very rarely” can “cause sudden death”.
The 57-year-old former Big Brother host had surgery to remove the tumour, and spent time in intensive care before recovering from home.
McCall told entrepreneur and podcaster Steven Bartlett: “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,” she continued.
“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.”
Watch highlights from a tearful Davina McCall’s interview with Steven Bartlett. Credit: Begin Again with Davina McCall.
McCall 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 Bartlett asks her how soon McCall had a conversation with her husband about dying, she 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 that she updated her will, and wrote letters of wishes to all of her children.
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.’”
Now the host of the ITV dating show My Mum, Your Dad, McCall has been a long-time advocate of women’s health. She was given a special recognition award at the National Television Awards last year, and received an MBE for services to broadcasting in 2023.
Non-cancerous brain tumours are more common in people over the age of 50, and symptoms include headaches, vision problems and drowsiness, according to the NHS. Some can be “difficult to remove without damaging surrounding tissue”.
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