Davina McCall has reflected on her mortality after coming close to “sudden death” when she was diagnosed with a brain tumour last year.
The 57-year-old TV presenter and Masked Singer judge underwent a successful operation to remove a rare 14mm-wide benign tumour, a colloid cyst, from her brain, in November 2023.
"They said, 'You have a benign cyst in your brain'. It can also cause sudden death,” she told entrepreneur Steven Bartlett on her Begin Again podcast about the diagnosis.
McCall opened up about how she made preparations for her death, writing her children letters in the event that she didn’t survive the condition.
Although the presenter battled tough feelings of anger and confusion, she said that the close call taught her an important lesson that she’s now eager to share with younger people.
“There's that saying, ‘A life lived in fear is a life half-lived.’ If you don't really want to do something, don't do it. But if there's something that you want to do, yeah, do it,” she said. “Write your bucket list now.”
A bucket list is a wish list of experiences, goals and dreams that a person hopes to achieve in their lifetime.
Describing the experience of writing her own list, McCall said: “When I did one with my sister, Caroline, we wrote a really sweet, lovely bucket list.
“She died before she could do any of it. Why are we doing bucket lists when we're dying? Write the bucket list now, in your thirties, and go, "What is my bucket list? What do I want to do before I die? And let's start doing it now."
After the experience, McCall said she is left with an overwhelming feeling of gratitude.
“Oh my God, [I feel] grateful,” she said. “I feel like life's never going to be the same again, but in rather a good way.”
She also cleared up a misconception about benign tumours.
“I have newfound enormous sympathy for people who have benign brain tumours. Because you think... I have had so many people say to me, ‘Well, at least it was benign.’ And you think, ‘You have no idea that benign brain tumours can still kill you.’” she said.
“It's just you don't know when it's going to happen. It could happen tomorrow, it could happen in years' time. It's different to cancer, but it is also awful. A benign does not mean fine. Living with that uncertainty is pretty terrifying.”
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