DAY 1: COLEEN
Aterrifying health scare gave Loose Women star Coleen Nolan the push she needed to finally give up cigarettes after more than 40 years as a smoker.
Coleen, 58, developed an acute chest infection, leaving her struggling to breathe and fearing she would die.
She explains: “I literally couldn’t walk a few feet without stopping to catch my breath. It was the scariest thing, feeling constantly winded.
“After Loose Women one day, our warm-up guy Lee insisted on taking me to see a doctor, who put me on antibiotics. Being a typical woman and mum, I kept saying I’d be fine.”
But when Coleen got back to her hotel that night in early December to meet her partner Michael Jones, 60, things took a turn for the worse.
“I met Michael outside the hotel and by the time we’d gone up in the elevator and walked a few paces to my room, I was gasping and trying to say that I couldn’t breathe,” reveals Coleen.
“I had a full-scale panic attack and the more stressed I got and the more I cried, the less able I was to breathe.
“I genuinely thought ‘I’m going to die in my hotel room, away from home’. It was really frightening.
“The whole thing lasted two minutes but it felt like an hour.”
The next day, Coleen made an emergency appointment with her doctor back home in Cheshire. She adds: “He knows I smoke and told me I could be looking at COPD and emphysema.
“The message was, if you carry on smoking, this is what will happen.
“I thought: ‘What the hell am I doing?’ I want to be around for as long as I can for my kids.”
Coleen shares daughter Ciara, 22, with former husband Ray Fensome, and sons Shane, 34, and Jake, 31, with her first husband, former Eastenders star Shane Richie.
Her doctor sent her for a chest X-ray and blood tests the next day, before an agonising wait for the results.
She says: “I was going to bed at night, saying to Michael, ‘I’ve got COPD or lung cancer... what an idiot!’
“When I went back to get the results and was told my X-ray had come back clear, it was a massive relief. My chest will probably never recover but hopefully quitting will mean it won’t get any worse. I felt like the universe was saying ‘this is your last chance’.”
Coleen hasn’t smoked for 12 weeks