Fiona Phillips on fears for her boys - ‘I worried they'd treat me differently’
She’s known to millions as the bubbly face of television, so when Fiona Phillips shared the “horrible secret” of the Alzheimer’s diagnosis she’s been hiding for 18 months, it left many in a state of shock.
But, as she sits at home on the sofa, with her husband of 26 years, This Morning executive Martin Frizell, close by, it’s clear she’s still coming to terms with her new reality. “I felt more angry than anything else because this disease has already impacted my life in so many ways; my poor mum was crippled with it, then my dad, my grandparents, my uncle. It just keeps coming back for us.”
Back in 2015, Fiona revealed, “I need to sort out an action plan that can be used if I ‘disappear’ – of course I fear inheriting the disease with my family history, and I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night feeling anxious and worried about it.” Fiona is a long-time ambassador for the Alzheimer’s Society charity and has often used her platform and reputation to spark conversations and raise awareness after witnessing the disease destroy her parents as she knew them.
But after a gentle prompt from Martin, she concedes she’s been feeling low, saying, “I guess that’s what comes from being divested of everything you have lived with and loved.” For a woman who first started earning a wage doing a paper round aged 11, not being able to work is incredibly difficult, and it’s left a “massive hole” in her life.
What followed that appointment was a series of difficult yet conclusive tests to get to the bottom of the changes in Fiona’s health. She underwent a lumbar puncture, during which doctors take a sample of cerebrospinal fluid from the lower back to test for unusual levels of proteins in the blood that indicate the brain is affected by Alzheimer’s.
Recalling her final years on GMTV before she left to concentrate on caring for her dad, she said, “I’d been doing it for a long time but during that time both my parents had been very, very ill with Alzheimer’s. I had two children during that time as well, so I had very young children, two very ill parents, and very early starts.”“We thought it was just old people saying funny things and forgetting things,” she said previously.
Fiona was assessed to see how far her Alzheimer’s had progressed – it needed to be mild – and thankfully secured the final place on the miridesap drug trial. “Most of all we have to find a cure or way of managing this terrible disease because it is crippling people and crippling the health service.
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