Topics: Roman Kemp, Health, Celebrity
Martin Kemp, best known for being part of Spandau Ballet and his role as Steve Owen in Eastenders, has opened up about little-known symptom of his brain tumours.
Martin, 62, was diagnosed with two benign tumours on his brain in 1995, having spoken openly about his ordeal, revealing on Piers Morgan's Life Stories in 2014 that it was his wife Shirlie that found the lump.
He explained at the time: "If they’d never found this one growing out, they wouldn’t have found the one in the middle until it was too late, and that was the one that would have killed me."
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Now, Martin has further opened up about the symptoms he had been experiencing on FFS! My Dad Is Martin Kemp, the podcast he co-hosts with his son Roman Kemp.
He said: "I had symptoms, I realised I had a symptom when it was taken out.
"[It was] 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."
He added: "It was a nightmare, that whole brain tumour five years that I had.
"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."
Martin concluded: "‘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.
"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."
Martin also made comments about his life expectancy on the pair's podcast.
When Roman asked him how long he thinks he's got left to live, and Martin responded: "I’ll be really honest with you, 10 years.
"I don’t know how long I’ve got left, but I will tell you, since I was the age of 34, when I went through all of that brain tumour scare, I spent two years of my life thinking I was going to die.
"I think after that, everything else, every day, every year, every month that I’ve lived, every experience that I’ve had has been a bonus.
"I will tell you something, it’s really strange that when I was 34 and stuff and I went through that brain tumour stuff, I was practically resigned to the fact that I was going to die, but I was quite happy with my lot, because I had lived the most incredible experiences."
