Olivia Williams will never be cancer free due to misdiagnosis

Olivia Williams, known for starring in The Crown, opened up about her cancer journey in a new interview with The Times.

The actress admitted that she had been getting misdiagnosed for 4 years before a tumour was discovered on her pancreas by her doctor.

“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 ranted.

“I go in like a puppy with this optimistic, bright face and then they give me bad news,” she added about her regular checkups.

Continuing, “And it’s like, oh my God, I fell for it again. They’ve found new metastases pretty well either just before Christmas or in the middle of a summer holiday. Then, for three years in a row, they started appearing too close to major blood vessels to zap. So there was a period when we were just sitting and watching them grow, which is a horrible feeling.”

Pushing for early testing, Williams explained, “The average time from diagnosis to death [for pancreatic cancer] is three months — and that figure has not improved in 50 years. t takes an average person with my cancer 11 visits to the GP to be diagnosed. For me it was probably about 21 times.”

“Because it’s so quick and so shocking, people tend to liken losing someone to this cancer to losing them in a car crash,” the star added. “What could change that is early detection with a test that could be as simple as breathing into a bag at your GP. We’re incredibly close, we just need to get it over the line.”

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