Actress Olivia Williams has heartbreakingly revealed that she will never be cancer-free after being misdiagnosed with menopause symptoms instead.
Williams, 56, who is best known for playing Camilla Parker Bowles in the final two seasons of Netflix’s The Crown, and Felicity in Friends, revealed that her symptoms had repeatedly been brushed off for four years before she received a diagnosis.
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Tragically, by the time she finally received her diagnosis of pancreatic cancer in 2018, it had spread to other areas of her body.
Williams told The Times: “If someone had f**king 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.”
The Sixth Sense star revealed that she had visited the doctor 21 times in three countries with the symptoms she was experiencing, but they had brushed it off as other things.
By the time her tumor was discovered, the disease had already spread to her liver, “which, as anyone involved in the cancer life knows, is the worst news,” she explained.
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Williams revealed that she is now “zapped by microwave ablation” to treat recurring metastasized cancer cells in her body, adding: “We’ve been playing whack-a-mole every time they appear.”
Pancreatic cancer is often diagnosed at a later stage as it often does not show any symptoms, or they may be difficult to spot.
Symptoms can include jaundice, a loss of appetite or losing weight without trying to, tiredness or a lack of energy, pain in the stomach or back, constipation or bloating, as well as changes in the feces.
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Williams revealed that while she tries to stay positive with her treatment, she has received bad news on several occasions.
She explained: “I go in like a puppy with this optimistic, bright face and then they give me bad news.
“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.”
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Williams revealed that her own symptoms had included aching limbs and chronic diarrhoea, but doctors had initially suspected she may have been perimenopausal or have the autoimmune disease lupus, both of which were ruled out after testing.
Her cancer was finally found by a UK rheumatologist, who discovered the tumor in her pancreas.
She underwent several surgeries to remove the tumor and now has to take medication and undergo regular scans for the metastases, as well as being treated four times with targeted internal radiotherapy.
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Williams, who has two daughters aged 17 and 20, added: “It’s supposed to buy me maybe a year, maybe two or three years, of freedom from treatment.
“In the best-case scenario, it would have made [the metastases] disappear, but that didn’t happen.”
She is now set to run the London Marathon in honor of Pancreatic Cancer UK, to raise vital funds to help diagnosis and treatment of the disease.