Cancer stricken Leah Bracknell reveals she hasn’t asked how long she has left, as she opens up about the pain of telling her daughters
INSPIRATIONAL Leah Bracknell has opened up about her battle with lung cancer and the heartbreak of telling her daughters that she was terminal, describing it as “the worst thing I’ve had to do.”
The 52-year-old ex-Emmerdale actress who is mum to Lily, 25, and Maya, 21, says that despite her life-changing diagnosis, the news is worse for her family.
“Any mother will know how I felt,” Leah says in an interview with The Daily Mail.
“It’s the worst thing you can imagine having to tell those closest to you, something like this . . . trying to find the words. It’s the worst thing I’ve had to do…
“I think it’s almost worse for those close to you because they’re trying to look after and protect the person who’s poorly, not just physically, but emotionally.”
Sharing that the conversation she had with her daughters was “extremely difficult”, Leah adds: “After all this time and tests I think my family suspected that the news wasn’t good. Their reaction was as you would expect, but we’re getting there.
“I’m 52, I’m not 20, or ten. It would be worse if it was your child, I can’t imagine worse than that, to be honest. I don’t think ‘Why me?’ no, because, why anybody?”
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Leah was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer last month after first showing symptoms at the end of August.
She was told that her condition wasn’t curable, but the actress refuses to give up and thanks to the public generously donating thousands of pounds she is now able to travel to Germany for treatment.
“I’m a very private person, and it was never my intention for my appeal to go public. But people have been so massively generous I wanted to be able to say thank you,” she says.
“To discover I have all these friends has been phenomenally touching and, weirdly, I feel really lucky. What has happened to me has allowed me to see the beauty of humankind and that’s really powerful.
“Maybe if you ask me two or three months down the line I’ll have a different story, but right now I do feel very blessed.”
In a mind of matter move, Leah is channelling positive thoughts in a bid to fight the disease head on.
“I just won’t project out there that I might die imminently. What I’m projecting is that I’m going to live longer — a good, healthy, strong life — and I’m going to beat this.
“It could be deluded, but otherwise it makes you feel things are futile or helpless. I don’t want to feel helpless; I want to feel I can do something.”
And as she strives to stay positive, the actress admits she hasn’t asked doctors how long she has left to live.
“I haven’t asked and didn’t want to ask. I wasn’t going to give them the power to put that in my mind.
“They told me not to look at the statistics as they said they were years old and involved people a lot older.”