I’m A Celeb star Tulisa opens up about heartbreaking condition that led to her undergoing plastic surgery

Last night, we finally met this year's camp mates as they entered the jungle for this year's season of I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!.

ITV viewers seemed to be particularly excited over 36-year-old N-Dubz star Tulisa, to see how she would fare Down Under alongside her fellow campers.

Now, it's been quite a while since Tulisa has been on our screens so fans were excited to see her once again. However, many fans of the show may not have known that part of the reason behind the musician's absence from the spotlight was due to a change in her appearance following a brutal blow to her health a few years back.

Speaking on Olivia Attwood's So Wrong It's Right podcast earlier this month, Tulisa opened up about her first Bell's palsy attack that happened when she was just 24 years old.

The 'Girls' singer, who was also a former judge on the X Factor, discussed the health condition that she was diagnosed with back in 2020, which the NHS describes as a 'temporary weakness or lack of movement that usually affects one side of the face'.

Symptoms include; not being able to move one side of your face which usually happens over a few days, a drooping eyelid or corner of your mouth, drooling, dry mouth, loss of taste and a dry or watering eye.

Tulisa shared: "I was sat at home, and I had this huge burst of inflammation on my cheek, as if, like, I had an abscess in there or something and I went straight to a doctor.

The 'Female Boss' was diagnosed with Bell’s palsy back in 2020 (Instagram/@tulisacontostavlos)

"They gave me antibiotics, steroid injections - don't know what caused it - and then it went down to a certain extent, left with some mild swelling, and then my whole face just dropped."

She explained that her face 'remained like that for seven months' during which she 'didn't go out' and just 'hid in the house'.

She continued: "Then, as I was coming to the end of the seven months, my face is still not right. I still have the mild swelling. So what I would do is I would go and get fillers to try and balance out the symmetry."

Describing it a 'vicious cycle', Tulisa said she then started seeing doctors all around the UK until she finally found one who decided to do an 'explorative op' on her which led to them finding 'three chronically infected cysts' in her face.

Olivia sympathetically added: "That's awful, though, that journey. You could have had that solved years ago, if someone had just actually took it seriously."

Tulisa previously revealed what cosmetic work she's had done (Dave Hogan/Getty Images)

Tulisa also previously discussed what plastic surgery procedures she's had done on Loose Women back in 2020 where she insisted she hadn't gone wholly under the knife until more recently, despite speculation that she'd amended her looks in the years prior.

"I hadn't had any surgery until, confession time, recently," she began by telling viewers. "All the time before there was no surgery, it was only fillers."

Find out more about Bell's palsy on the official NHS website here.

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