‘I had to tell my son he had a brain tumour’
Discovering her teenage son’s illness was devastating, ‘Tomorrow’s World’ presenter Philippa Forrester tells Rosa Silverman
When Philippa Forrester’s teenage son Fred started suffering from exhaustion and struggling to concentrate at school, everyone assured her it was normal. “He’s 15, so of course this was going to happen,” they said.
Then the headaches began – but again there was an explanation. “I took him to the doctor, who said they were migraines, which made perfect sense because that’s what my husband and I both have,” Forrester, 49, tells me over the phone from her ranch-style home in Wyoming, where she and her husband, photojournalist Charlie Hamilton James, 44, moved from Bath in 2014.
But the painkillers prescribed to Fred had little effect. “Sometimes there would be three or four days of quite a lot of pain without him being able to get on top of it, so that was quite worrying,” says the presenter, best known as the face of BBC series Tomorrow’s World in
the Nineties. “The headaches were waking him up, and one morning he came out of his room and vomited.”
When, during the summer of 2016, he complained that looking at a computer screen made his head hurt, Forrester took him to see another doctor. That was when she first learnt how serious the situation might be. “The eye doctor said, ‘I want you to have an MRI scan immediately’,” she recalls. There followed a three-hour drive from their isolated rural home to the hospital, where Fred had his first seizure.
“His whole body went rigid,” says Forrester. “His eyes went into the back of his head; he was groaning; he smashed his head against the wall. I tried to hold him but I just couldn’t, so my husband ran to get help. We were rushed to an emergency room.”
Once Fred had been put on antiseizure medication, his parents were taken outside and shown the results of his scan. It revealed what Forrester describes as an “absolutely massive” brain tumour, measuring 6cm by 4cm by 4cm. Although it was not clear if the tumour was malignant, the doctor warned it could be aggressive cancer. “I went to the bathroom and vomited in shock,” says Forrester. “My husband lost it. We had lost his stepdad to cancer the year before and he’d also lost his dad to cancer.” Forrester’s television career spans more than 30 years and includes presenting Robot
Wars and producing Halcyon River Diaries. Her next project, a Channel 5 wildlife series called Nocturnal Britain, airs later this spring. Partly through her work, she has learned to stay calm in a crisis. “I went into superhuman mode. I thought, ‘If this is what’s happening, this is what’s happening.’ Looking back now, I can see it was another form of shock.”
The next step was to tell Fred – and to provide the emotional support he needed, all while dealing with her own feelings of terror. “I decided I was going to be the best mother I could be, whatever he had to go through,” she says. “I thought, ‘God knows what’s going to happen, but right now I’m going to go in and make him smile.’”
Fred was initially more upset to learn that he wouldn’t be able to go home that day. “But he had never seen his dad cry before,” adds Forrester. “After, Fred said, ‘I knew it was serious then’.”
The teenager was flown to a children’s hospital in Salt Lake City, Utah, where he was admitted to the neurology ward. “It was all a bit surreal,” says Forrester, who has not previously spoken publicly about her son’s illness but has chosen to do so to raise awareness of early diagnosis for Brain Tumour Awareness Month.
“It was like being in a dream. As we flew over the mountains I just looked down and thought, ‘I don’t know if he’s ever going to see them again.’ But you don’t panic because you’re somebody’s mum, so you’ve got to hold it together.”
While Forrester admits it was a “really dark” time, she says: “One of the things you need to do in a situation like that is try to find every positive you can.” One of those was that her mother-in-law already happened to be staying, and was able to take care of the couple’s younger sons, Arthur and Gus, who were given little information about their brother’s condition.
The next day, Fred underwent a four-hour surgery to remove the tumour. It was only then that Forrester broke down. “The point I lost it was when we said goodbye and he was wheeled in,” she says. “I thought, ‘I don’t have to be strong for him now and there’s nothing else I can do’.”
She eventually fell asleep in the waiting room. “I woke to the surgeon in front of us,” she says. “They told us surgery had been successful and they’d got the whole lot out in one. They still didn’t know if it was cancerous but at
that point your focus is, ‘Is he alive?’”
Fortunately, his recovery could not have gone better, and three days later, Fred was discharged. But the family had a three-week wait to find out if the tumour was cancerous.
“That was agony,” recalls Forrester. “It was rare, so they had to send it to St Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Tennessee.”
She and her husband were in a supermarket when they received the call. “They said that it was cancer, which we didn’t want to hear, but it was slow-growing. I was in tears of relief. We thought he’d have to chemotherapy and radiotherapy but he didn’t need that.”
Fred had PGNT glioma, a littleknown cancer typically diagnosed in teenagers. Doctors could not say how long it had been growing, but given its size, Fred, now 17, was lucky it came out in one piece. Since then, he’s had scans every few months and so far there is no sign of it returning. He is now back at school, and although his recovery will be slow, his mother is grateful for how things turned out. “Each scan is always nerve-racking, but it’s rare that this kind of tumour does come back, so we count our blessings every day,” she says. “It’s a miracle we didn’t end up in a much worse situation.”
Forrester admits she had dark days during Fred’s illness, but says she and her husband remained a “strong unit”.
“If you spoke to Charlie he’d say I was amazing, and that he fell apart. I am good in a crisis but not great after, so we complement each other.”
She is keen to raise awareness of the symptoms of her son’s disease. “Early diagnosis is key,” she stresses. “If I hadn’t taken him to the eye doctor we could have lost him. Often the tumour isn’t spotted and the person just dies because there isn’t time to save them. We have been incredibly lucky.”