My ‘tinnitus’ was a brain tumour
..but TV’s Rosie Millard wouldn’t have surgery until she’d run a half marathon and hosted a charity do with royalty
TWO weeks ago, Rosie Millard — journalist, marathon runner, mother-of-four and chair of BBC Children in Need, perhaps best known for wearing a low-plunging dress to report from the Oscars — was at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery.
She arrived at the London hospital at 7am, characteristically bright and breezy in high heels and a tight, short, blue flowery dress.
‘Sadly I wasn’t allowed to wear make-up or jewellery, but it was important to feel in control,’ she tells me.
Rosie was due to undergo a craniotomy, a six-hour operation to remove an apple-sized tumour from the front of her brain.
Despite her sunny disposition, there was a nagging voice in her head telling her: ‘This is the last time I will see my family.’ But, as she says: ‘I couldn’t give in.’
With apologies to anyone as squeamish as me, she describes the procedure as follows: ‘They slice open your scalp, pull the skin back with all the hair on it — basically they scalp you. Next, they get out the buzzsaw and saw a pane of your skull, take it out and put it on a plate. And then they start work . . .’
Ideally, she says, they would have just ‘snipped off’ her tumour. But instead of being what brain surgeons jocularly call an ‘easypeeler’, it was glued to the front of her brain. So the surgeon had to ‘sort of scrape it away in layers’, she explains — which is why it took six hours.
‘The tumour had stuck itself to my brain and just grown and grown,’ she says. ‘But I was lucky because there’s some space at the front of the brain and it had grown so slowly that my brain had made way for it.’
It’s just days after the op, and as she potters around in her dressing gown in her kitchen, it’s hard not to gawp at the enormous stapled scar which swoops in a ridged arc from her forehead to behind her right ear, like an angry train track.
In an hour’s time, she is due back at the hospital to have the 40 staples removed. ‘I feel as if I’ve been kicked in the head by a horse,’ she says. But she doesn’t care because, after a terrible few months, she’s alive and on the mend.
She can listen to her daughter Honey, 15, play the violin; bury her face in 13-year-old son Lucien’s hair; take a phone call from her eldest son Gabriel on his first day at university; joke about her husband’s dodgy ironing and look forward to a glass of wine or three.
Her sense of fun came to national attention when she covered the 2001 Oscars ceremony for the BBC. Her decolletage was on full display in a Vivienne Westwood dress that led her colleague Michael Buerk to remark: ‘That was Rosie Millard in the Best Supporting Dress.’
The next morning, flattered by all the attention, she modelled it for a photoshoot. Today she says: ‘Oh my God, I hate that picture. I had a massive hangover and I looked a right old slapper.’
Rosie’s medical drama started with a touch of tinnitus in February. She was doing the a half marathon and heard a mild ‘whooshing’ in her right ear. It was faint and intermittent, but annoying.
Assuming it was a build-up of wax, she syringed her ear, but there was no improvement. So she decided to see her doctor, who found nothing wrong. She was sent to an ear specialist, who said the same. However, Rosie, whose parents, brother and sister-in-law are all doctors, thought otherwise. ‘I had a sinking feeling — I knew something was wrong,’ she says.
But since she felt fine and the doctors weren’t worried, she carried on as normal. She juggled work with four kids, gave speeches, and started organising an event with Prince Charles for the charity Children and the Arts (for which she is the chief executive). But still the ear whooshed. So, come May, with a sense of foreboding, she went back to the specialist.
‘There’s something in my head that’s annoying my ear,’ she told him. ‘I think I’ve got a brain tumour. I want an MRI.’ She said he laughed.
But Rosie is not the sort of woman used to taking ‘no’ for an answer. She was offered a scan three weeks later.
‘I stood by this enormous machine and thought: “I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to know what’s in my head. I don’t want to get in it,” ’ she recollects. But of course she was desperate to know.
Three days later, the clinic called and she was asked to go back urgently. ‘My worst fear was they would find I had early-onset Alzheimer’s — that my brain was decomposing,’ she said. ‘But instead the doctor said: “You’ve got a very large brain tumour.”’ She felt the whole room ‘fizzing’ around her, she recalls. ‘I said: “Get my husband!” ’
Every year, nearly 400 people in Ireland are diagnosed with a primary brain tumour. Rosie was told she had a meningioma — a tumour that affects just one in 38,000, which grows on the membranes that cover the brain in the skull.
Hers was huge, but benign. They could tell it wasn’t malignant, she says, because rather than being ‘spidery and tentacling into the brain’, it was perched on the edge. Crucially, it was accessible.
There were no tears. Rosie simply got up, left the room, walked across the road and called her father. His response? ‘It’s not a disaster — it’s a bore. It’s not malignant. It’s not cancer.’ This became her mantra for the next few months.
‘I kept thinking, “Of all the people, why am I the one with the horrible globe in my head?”’ she says. ‘I eat my six a day. I run. I’m healthy. I’m active. I make the most of life. I’ve got four children. I’m needed.’
She and Pip told their children over a barbecue in their back garden on the evening of her diagnosis.
Meanwhile, life marched on. Just days after the bombshell, she was at Buckingham Palace to receive an OBE from for services to the arts. No one would have had an inkling she had a brain tumour.
On July 2, she met her surgeon, Patrick Grover, and was shown the scan results. She was told there was no evidence the tumour was linked to a brain injury she’d suffered in a car crash aged 18, and informed of the risks of operating.
But there was no alternative, because the tumour was slowly growing bigger. Even so, she postponed the operation briefly — to celebrate her eldest daughter Phoebe’s 21st birthday and attend the Children and the Arts event with Prince Charles. ‘I had to be there; I was hosting!’ she says.
She re-embraced her long-abandoned Christian faith and started praying. She threw herself into work and running, hitting a personal best in a half marathon.
‘I had terrible moments when I knew I was going to die,’ she admitted. ‘I was terrified I would wake up during the operation.’
Fortunately, the operation was a success. When she came round she immediately knew she was okay.
‘I knew who I was. I knew I was there. I knew I was fine,’ she says.
Before she left the hospital, she knelt at the side of her bed in prayer. ‘I just said: ‘Thank you, God. Thank you.’
She has a lot to be thankful for: the superb medical treatment, the kindness of her family and friends, and the years ahead.
But most of all, she’s thankful she followed her hunch and wasn’t afraid to badger the doctors until she got her MRI.
Because if she hadn’t, that ‘globe’ would still be there, a ticking timebomb, until the minute it could have had a catastrophic effect.
They slice open your scalp and pull the skin back My worst fear was that they’d find Alzheimer’s I was terrified I would wake up during surgery