Davina McCall has opened up about how she has regained her strength after needing a major brain operation.
In November, the former Big Brother host underwent major surgery to remove a benign colloid cyst from her brain, which she described as a “three in a million" rare tumour. Davina’s operation was successful, and she has since been given the all-clear.
Now, six months on from her surgery, Davina has reflected on how her healing journey has been going so far.
In an interview with Women’s Health, the 57-year-old admitted that her love for exercise was the key to her recovery.
“I knew that exercise was going to help me come back. I felt like it was the missing piece of me. I felt like my memory was coming back and I was feeling stronger in myself, in my mind. But working on my body was going to be the last bit of joy to come back to my life,” she explained.
“I wasn’t afraid of working out. I knew it would help me. But I was reluctant to get back into it. I was a bit, ‘Am I ready? Is this the right time? Can I do it?’ Vulnerable, I felt vulnerable,” she confessed.
Davina then went on to describe how she felt after working out for the first time post-surgery.
“I can’t tell you how much I cried after I did the first one. I was so proud. I didn’t care that I had to stop halfway through the exercises or whether I was ‘going to fail’. I didn’t beat myself up. I felt so strong. And I loved feeling out of breath again,” she gushed.
The TV star also revealed that her memory skills have taken longer to recover than she expected.
“My short-term memory after the operation was really poor. I was like Dory from Finding Nemo. I literally couldn’t remember anything. So I woke up in the morning and I went to go to the loo and was like, ‘Oh my God, my legs, why am I hurting? Oh, right… I worked out yesterday.’ And then I was like, ‘I love this pain.’ It was a really good way of sparking my memory,” Davina detailed.
