I’ve got a brain tumour, reveals Bake Off Sue
SUE Perkins has been living with a brain tumour that means she is unable to have children, she has revealed.
The Great British Bake Off presenter told an interviewer she had been diagnosed with a benign growth on her pituitary gland eight years ago while filming a TV series.
The 45-year- old star, dating TV presenter Anna Richardson, 44, said she was devastated when she found out the growth affected her reproductive hormones.
She told Good Housekeeping magazine: ‘We live in a time and place where we think everything is possible.
‘I don’t know if I would have gone on to have children. But as soon as someone says you can’t have something, you want it more than anything.’
Miss Perkins added: ‘ I’m lucky that it’s benign so it’s not in itself a worrying thing.
‘ 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.’
The Bake Off host, who copresents the show with comedy partner Mel Giedroyc, 47, said she found out about the tumour while filming another show for the BBC, Supersizers – in which she ate food from different eras.
Doctors who had conducted medical tests to see how the various diets had affected her broke the news of the growth.
‘I found out when I had a check-up while filming The Supersizers eight years ago,’ she told the magazine.
‘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.
‘That’s what really made me think that the balance [in my life] was wrong.’
Miss Giedroyc has two children with her husband, Ben Morris. Miss Perkins added: ‘When she 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.’
The Bake Off has helped make Miss Perkins a household name – as it was revealed last week that the two hosts command a regular income of more than £100,000 a series.
Both have secured lucrative work on the back of the show.
Miss Perkins has an autobiography, Spectacles, out in October, while her company, Sue Perkins Limited, has a net worth of £250,000.
She met her partner Miss Richardson at a fancy dress party in Devon last year.
‘An experience I won’t share’