Trisha Goddard has sadly announced in a heartbreaking interview that she has incurable cancer and is undergoing life-prolonging treatment.
The 66-year-old TV presenter - best known for hosting the talk show Trisha - was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2008, and recovered from the illness in the following year.
However, Goddard shared in a recent interview with Hello Magazine that she discovered that the disease returned 15 years later, this time to her right hip.
She has been diagnosed with secondary breast cancer - also known as metastatic or stage 4 breast cancer - for which there is treatment, but no cure. The cancer started in the breast and has moved to another part of the body.
The mom-of-two, who now lives in Connecticut in the United States and presents a weekly eponymous show on TalkTV, said she wanted to be open about her secondary diagnosis as keeping her battle a secret was "becoming a burden".
"I can't lie, I can't keep making up stories," she told the magazine. "It gets to a stage, after a year and a half, when keeping a secret becomes more of a burden than anything else."
"[The disease] is not going to go away, and with that knowledge comes grief, and fear. But I must keep enjoying what I have always enjoyed," she continued.
Her diagnosis was discovered when she noticed she had been incurring injuries from doing activities such as weight training sessions in the gym, ice skating, and running.
One day, Goddard had a serious fall when she was running up the stairs in her home, sharing: "I was upside down, my legs behind me, and clinging on to the banister. I went to move my leg - and I’m not a wimp -but I’d never felt pain like it. I now know it was shattered."
The TV personality was taken to hospital, where a doctor revealed that they found cancer cells in her right hip. "That was the first I heard that the cancer had come back. And the first thing I asked was: ‘Am I going to die?'" she told the outlet.
Goddard was treated with daily radiation for three weeks and weekly chemotherapy for four and a half months. However, she said she has opted for "life pro-longing care" for her incurable diagnosis.
"When you go to the doctors in the States, there’s a choice of three little boxes you tick for treatment of stage 4 cancer," she said. "One is cure, one is life-prolonging and one is palliative. There’s that awful feeling when you’re sitting there thinking: 'Which one?’ And mine is life-prolonging."
The journalist shared that while she has decided to make her diagnosis public, she does not want to become what she defines as "a poster girl for cancer," adding: "It’s not who I am. It’s not why I’m here...Also, I didn’t want to read words like 'dying' and 'terminal' or 'battling,'" she said. "Or 'inspirational,' because it’s all b******s."
Goddard was the first Black British female presenter to have a daytime talk show in the UK. Her self-titled show aired on ITV from 1998 to 2004, before moving to Channel 5, where it was broadcast until 2010.
She was also a regular panelist on ITV’s Loose Women in 2002 and has since hosted talk shows for US broadcasts like NBC and CNN. In addition to this, Goddard was featured on season 12 of Dancing on Ice in 2020, where she paired up with professional skater Łukasz Różycki.
The TV star told Hello Magazine that she put off revealing her cancer diagnosis because she was worried that she'd lose her job or be seen as a "frail little thing" by the public.
"My worry is that people will start seeing me as a frail little thing and that if [the news] got out, I’d be judged, or people would change the way they are with me, or that I wouldn’t work," she explained. "I’m a journalist; I don’t want to be 'the story.' I don’t want to be interviewing someone and for them to say to me: 'I'm so sorry.'"
Our thoughts are with Goddard at this time.
