I’ve learned to manage pain
QVC presenter Alison Young tells Claire Coleman about living with chronic health issues and migraines that have plagued her since falling from a horse during childhood
WHEN she’s holding court on QVC, you’d have no idea Alison Young suffers every day with chronic pain as a result of a range of injuries and illnesses.
In her own words, she “jangles” with the medication that keeps her alive.
“When my arthritis – which is in 19 parts of my body, from my neck to my feet – flares, I can’t hold a kettle or a mug,” said the presenter. “When it’s really, bad I can’t move from my bed.
“I also take daily medication for migraines and have a panic button in case one comes on suddenly and I’m somewhere remote.”
The 55-year-old, who lives on a farm in Surrey and has just written her first book, The Beauty Insider, has been the shopping channel’s beauty expert for almost 30 years.
Her fans trust her implicitly and while QVC is cagey about giving out numbers, those in the industry talk of the day she shifted 78,000 Elemis skincare sets, worth an estimated £1.8million.
She puts her appeal down to being “Mrs Ordinary, Mrs Average. Not some super-injected, fabulous, unobtainable person”, but she also credits some of her health issues for her success.
Alison said: “I’d suffered from eczema and psoriasis as a child, then as a teen I had acne. And while I had the grades to go to university, I wanted to do something practical. Training as a beauty therapist seemed to offer the opportunity to get solutions to those problems.”
While she managed to learn how to treat her acne and can, to a certain extent, control her eczema through carefully checking the ingredients of the products she uses, her psoriasis – an auto-immune disease – has worsened with age while migraines, the legacy of a childhood fall from a horse, has been harder to treat.
“I’ve been into horses since I was three,” she said. “I’m not from a privileged background but was a very hyperactive child. When my mum asked the doctor what to do, she was told, ‘Get her doing every hobby on the planet and find out what she clicks with’. They tried swimming, iceskating, gymnastics, but riding stuck.”
Over the years, Alison has suffered multiple injuries. “I’ve broken my back three times, my rotator cuff, my clavicle, my nose three or four times… there’s a reason I support the Injured Jockeys Fund and the Air Ambulance,” she added.
But it was a concussion, received aged 11 when she fell from her horse during a showjumping competition, that triggered Alison’s migraines.
“My leg got stuck in the stirrup and my head was basically kicked around. I didn’t have any X-rays, but I was knocked out for a while.”
Initially, doctors thought the headaches were hormonal.
“They were blamed on my periods,” she said. “I often got them around my time of the month but they’d also come on intermittently. It’s a level of pain that can cause me to vomit or fall unconscious.
“It wasn’t until my early 20s that I began to have them properly investigated and a doctor told me, ‘You’ve got a hole in your head, there’s a bit in your brain on the front left-hand side that’s dead tissue’.”
Alison added: “I almost don’t know it’s pain. I devised a method in my head I still use to manage my migraines. I think of it as a scale from one to 10. One to four doesn’t even register. At five I need to be careful, probably take some drugs.
“If I get to six, I know if it doesn’t come down within a few hours, I’m going to be in real trouble and it could easily go all the way to a 10.
“If it’s a 10, I know I’ll be on the floor, I’ll need a pethidine injection, but I also know it will come back down to a nine.”
Despite this, she very rarely has to cancel a TV show but “if you see me sitting down, it might be because I can’t stand up, if I’m holding the table, it might be because I’m a bit dizzy”.
Last year, during the pandemic, she had her worst arthritis flare-up ever.
“I hadn’t been able to get hold of my immuno-suppressants because the hospital department had been closed. I couldn’t pick up the phone. They had to steroid me out of that one.”
Alison added: “I get bored with my illnesses but it’s not what defines me.” The Beauty Insider: Effortless Skincare and Beauty Advice that Works is out now