Trisha Goddard kept incurable cancer diagnosis quiet as she ‘wanted to be me’

TV presenter Trisha Goddard has said she kept quiet about her incurable breast cancer diagnosis as she “just wanted to work and be me.”

Goddard, 66, who had recovered from breast cancer some years earlier after a 2008 diagnosis, revealed to Hello magazine in February that she had been diagnosed 19 months prior with secondary breast cancer, also known as stage four cancer, for which there is treatment but no cure.

Speaking on ITV’s Good Morning Britain (GMB) about why she “kept it quiet”, she said: “I was grappling with how to deal with it myself. Plus I just wanted to work and be me.

“With CNN and my colleagues there, they didn’t know that I had no hair, that I had no feeling in my legs – from the treatment, because I had chemo every week for four and a half months.

“And I was telling you that story about one of my colleagues, name drop, Don Lemon at CNN.

“He was very sweet and we were on air, and he went (pointing to her nose), ‘Nose, nose, nose’ because of chemo you get these nose bleeds and so I quickly wiped it up and I said to my husband afterwards, ‘I’m mortified, Don saw me have this nose bleed’ and he said, ‘Oh, it’s all right, honey, he probably just thinks you’re one of these high flyers who was doing coke all night’.”

Goddard also explained that her treatment started the morning after her wedding and said that her honeymoon was delayed for two years because of that.

Speaking about her honeymoon, she said: “I’m one of those people who doesn’t do sea and fishes and water and that, and I went scuba diving. I thought, what the hell, what have you got to be frightened of?”.

Discussing why she does not want to be the ‘poster girl’ for cancer she added: “It’s not who I am, it’s what I’m living with.

“And coming back to people with with chronic illnesses, I think we do them a disservice when we use words like ‘brave’, ‘champion’, ‘hero’, ‘survivor’, because they just want to grasp the life they have, and drink life unto the lees.

“And I don’t want everything to be ‘Oh, you look so good’, in brackets ‘considering you’ve got cancer’.”

Goddard has presented her own eponymous talk show and appeared on ITV celebrity competition series Dancing On Ice in 2020.

She is a correspondent/commentator for multinational news channel CNN, and hosts the TalkTV show Trisha Goddard at the weekend.