Paul Mescal’s mother has opened up about the moment she was diagnosed with an incurable cancer – as she reveals the life advice she told her Oscar-nominated son.
Dearbhla Mescal is currently undergoing treatment for Multiple myeloma, which is a type of bone marrow cancer that often affects several areas of the body, such as the spine, skull, pelvis and ribs.
Dearbhla opened up about when she discovered she was sick in July last year after attending the men’s final at Wimbledon with Paul, in what was her first ever event that she was accompanying her son to.
READ MORE - Paul Mescal reveals 'everybody' has been saying his name wrong as Irish actor clears it up
She said: "I had my first event with Paul. I had never been to an event with Paul possibly out of protection to us because he knows how crazy the world is.
"So I got this great honour of going to the men’s Wimbledon final. That was arriving in at half two. I came home and I had a scan after work on the Tuesday. On the Thursday, they had found lesions or tumours.
"So the pain had been in my right shoulder and the following Sunday… so I literally walked out of Centre Court and walked into the Oncology unit in the Beacon (Hospital) the following Sunday.
"That was last July. Nell had gifted me Coldplay tickets to Paris and I was to go with her and I had to try and figure out – her song Graduating had just been released – and I didn’t want to overshadow that. Donnacha had just moved to New York four days previously.
"So it was all like, you couldn’t write it, you’re talking into the phone to the three of them (saying) ‘It’s good cancer’. At that point we didn’t know what kind of cancer it was but we had caught it early or believed we had.
"I had a wonderful team. I did my 17 weeks of chemo. I have Multiple myeloma so I’m very lucky I have my stem cells harvested, which basically means you’re going to go on a dialysis.
"I think the day I got the port in in St James' Hospital, cancer was real. I mean you’re surrounded and you’re very aware but you don’t realise… I don’t know, I don’t know why I didn’t realise.
"I was staying positive but that was a very real moment of getting the port in so I would be able to have the dialysis going on.
"I did the dialysis and the next phase, which was supposed to have happened.. that’s why I shaved my head the day the Oscar nomination came out because I was supposed to go in on the following Monday. It’s about a month of isolation so they hit you with nuclear chemo and then they reintroduce your stem cells back.
"It’s a bit like rebooting your phone. Back to factory settings I’ll be super-duper hopefully. It’s not a curable cancer, it is a seriously researched cancer. It’s kind of like a disease… I can live with it and I will take whatever medicines and I will do the holistic parts of my life," she told RTE Radio 1.
Dearbhla said "all of us know somebody with cancer", adding: "and now suddenly I am the person with cancer."
Dearbhla also opened up about her son’s overnight fame after Normal People and how the family are handling it all as they prepare to jet off to LA for the Oscar’s next week.
She told how the evening before the award-winning series was about to air, Paul went for a run and sat down with her while she gave him some life advice.
"I wild my back garden so my back garden is quite wild, and I had a swingy thing in the back garden. It was beautiful weather during Covid and I had just finished work. I was sitting at home, and he was running somewhere along the marshes because you could hear the birds.
"He said ‘It’s happening tomorrow’. It was going to be downloaded. He was jogging and he said, ‘my life is going to change. It’s either change for the good or the bad because how people perceive it is up to them’. And I said, ‘yeah’ and he said, ‘it’s going to be a crazy ride’ and I said, ‘I think it will be a crazy ride, but you had Lenny (Abrahamson) and you had Hettie (Macdonald), these amazing directors and you made the best friends of your life – Daisy, Fionn and India’. And they are still his friends."
She told him that if his career all came crashing down that "there’s always home" to come back to.
"That’s reality. Like for any of us, there’s always home. I have a blanket that I got made that says, ‘soft place to land’ and I think for any parent when your children, particularly at my age. I’m 54, when they’re at home, you can tuck them into bed and they’re quite safe but as soon as they start to move out, you can’t be there but what you can say is ‘I’m here, I’m always here and what’s the worst thing that can happen?’.
“People don’t like that, and you don’t get the part, come home, dinner will be on the table, the fridge is full and the blanket is here and the fire will be lit," she told host Ray D'Arcy.
But she admitted that when she read Paul’s character Connell in the Sally Rooney hit novel, she didn’t like him very much.
"Sally had written this amazing book that he had gotten me to read and I remember lying on the sofa and he was talking to me and he said ‘have you read it?’ and I said, ‘I have. I don’t know if I really like you. You didn’t bring her to the debs.’ I was like, ‘Can you not just play a Prince Charming and be nice?’," she added, laughing.
READ NEXT:
- GoFundMe page set up for family of 19-year-old man stabbed in Swords after he dies in hospital
- Drogheda mob boss Owen Maguire 'piles on pounds' and is 'too afraid' to emerge from fortified home
- Thousands more people eligible for €200 bonus social welfare payment amid changes
- RTE's Dancing with the Stars viewers all say the same thing as Shane Byrne and Karen Byrne voted off
- Ireland weather: Met Eireann forecasts dry week but subzero temperatures at night
Get breaking news to your inbox by Paul
