Actress Olivia Williams says she will never be able to be “cancer-free” due to years of medical misdiagnoses.
The Crown actress spoke to The Times about her four-year journey to track down what was wrong with her.
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The 56-year-old, who played Camilla Parker-Bowles in the Netflix series, told the outlet that she had spent years experiencing aching limbs, fatigue and chronic diarrhea, travelling across three different countries to see 10 different doctors for a solution.
She was diagnosed with everything from Lupus to perimenopause to IBS, only for a Los Angeles doctor to finally get to the bottom of it.
Four years after she began to look for answers, the Sixth Sense actress was diagnosed with VIPoma, a rare tumor, on her pancreas.
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But by then, it was too late.
”If someone had f—— well diagnosed me in the four years I’d been saying I was ill, when they told me I was menopausal or had irritable bowel syndrome or [was] crazy – I used that word advisedly because one doctor referred me for a psychiatric assessment – then one operation possibly could have cleared the whole thing and I could describe myself as cancer-free, which I cannot now ever be,” she said.
By the time the doctors had finally removed the tumour, the cancer had spread to her liver.
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Now the actress has to be ”zapped by microwave ablation” as new recurring metastasized cancer cells appear in her body, saying, “We’ve been playing whack-a-mole every time they appear.”
At times, the metastases appear too close to the major blood vessels to be able to zap, after which ensures a waiting game, watching them grow to be big enough to remove, “which is a horrible feeling,” she says.
She recounts that every time she goes in for her regular checkups, “I go in like a puppy with this optimistic, bright face and then they give me bad news. And it’s like, oh my God, I fell for it again.”
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Instead of wallowing in despair, the mother of two is throwing her weight behind the development of a cheap and early test to determine whether patients have pancreatic cancer, and it could be as simple as breathing into a bag at the doctor’s office. The actress will be supporting the London Marathon’s charity of the year, Pancreatic Cancer UK, to raise more money for the cause.
Williams is a mother of two daughters Esmé Ruby Stone and Roxana May Stone, aged 20 and 17, whom she shares with her husband Rhashan Stone.
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