Martin Kemp has revealed a unique symptom he didn’t notice until long after his brain tumour diagnosis.
The former EastEnders star, 62, has spoken openly about the two benign brain tumours he suffered from in the 90s and revealed that he lost his sense of smell completely when he had them.
Martin has since opened up further about his health in podcast FFS! My Dad Is Martin Kemp, with son Roman Kemp.
The Spandau Ballet bassist and his radio presenter son use the weekly show to discuss various subjects and in their most recent episode, Martin got candid about a ‘petrifying’ time of his life.
‘I had symptoms, I realised I had a symptom when it was taken out. About a year later. When all my smell came back.
‘But what I didn’t realise was that my smell had been disappearing, but that was the only thing I had.
‘But when they looked into my brain, when they MRI’d it they found a tumour in there that was like the size of a grapefruit, but it had all been squashed and flattened.’
During the podcast, the musician called the ordeal a ‘nightmare’.
‘It was a nightmare, that whole brain tumour five years that I had,’ he began.
‘It was ‘95, so I was about 34, 35, I was the healthiest I’d ever been in my life, I was in the gym every day, I was working out, I was on the running machine every day, lifting more weights than I’d ever done in my life.’
The actor explained that he first realised something was wrong when a large bump appeared at the back of his head, which went unnoticed until it became huge.
‘We didn’t notice it, then all of a sudden it started to grow really fast, like within a couple of weeks it went from being next to nothing to like an inch thick.’
Martin then revealed his wife Shirlie was anxious to get him to the hospital but he was reluctant.
‘Mum had warned me about it. We have kind of a different take on it, mum’s story is slightly different to mine, but it all got distorted in this time.’
Roman asked: ‘Were you scared to go into the hospital?’
‘Yeah, petrified. I was petrified,’ Martin admitted. ‘I was more scared – this is the maddest thing – I was more scared of going into hospital and checking into the neurology wad because I was Martin Kemp because I was famous. I hated the attention. Hated the idea.’
Martin went on to call the grapefruit-sized tumour ‘the luckiest thing’ to ever happy to him.
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After ‘the grapefruit’ was removed, another tumour was found on an MRI at the top of his spine which ‘would have killed’ Martin.
‘Nobody expected to see more than the grapefruit that was sitting at the back of my head, the grapefruit in a way, was like the luckiest thing that ever happened to me, it was like a signal that something was wrong.’
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Martin concluded positively: ‘If I never went to have the MRI done, they would never have seen the one in the middle one until it was too late, and that would have killed me.’
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