Featured Image Credit: Instagram/@charchilts/BBC
Topics: TV And Film, Health
Jess Hardiman
The Traitors star Charlotte Chilton has opened up about her battle with the so-called ‘suicide disease’, having had to go through a series of terrifying brain surgeries.
Charlotte, 32, was booted out of the hit BBC series last week, telling the round table as she left the show that she was a Faithful.
She decided to go on the show to prove to others that they’ve ‘got to go for it’, whatever they're going through, as people ‘can’t let it rule’ what they want to do.
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But she’s admitted a condition she has meant she faced a number of difficulties during the ‘immersive’ experience shooting the series.
Speaking to the Metro, the recruitment manager recalled: “I really struggled with the anxiety in it.
“I was sick multiple times, because I just couldn’t handle saying things to people I really liked and not knowing who I could trust.
“It was more like a social experiment.”
But Charlotte was clearly determined to get stuck in, having previously found herself ‘missing out on things in life’ after being diagnosed with a debilitating condition often dubbed the ‘suicide disease’ or ‘electric shock disease’.
She has trigeminal neuralgia, which Professor Kaveh Shakib - a highly experienced Oral and Maxillofacial surgeon - told casinos.win is ‘like a faulty wire’.
“Trigeminal neuralgia is when one particular branch of the trigeminal nerve that supplies the face with sensation has a dysfunction,” Kaveh said, adding: “It is very specific in that it presents with a very sudden extremely severe pain. Most patients describe it as excruciating.”
Speaking about the rare condition, Charlotte said: “You don’t know when you’re going to have your next pain and when you do have your pain, it can be managed sometimes with painkillers or it can be to a point you’re screaming, you want to stick a knife in your face because it’s unbearable.
“It’s actually known as the ‘suicide disease’ because it has such a high percentage of people who [die by] suicide because it’s just agony. It’s the worst pain condition you can have.”
She said she had a ‘very bad case’, and underwent surgery led by a top surgeon.
However, she then had a car accident and ‘bashed’ her head, which ‘messed up all the bits’ she’d had done.
"I was getting pains real bad again,” she continued.
“So I got rushed in and they did it again.
“This time they shredded the nerve as well as padding it all out in the hope that this would really help and it did, but the downside is the recovery was a lot worse and short term memory loss.”
Charlotte said she has ‘no feeling’ in parts of her face, and that her speech wasn’t very good, having had to relearn key functions like eating, talking, walking and working on her coordination.
Professor Kaveh added: “The terms that I have encountered over my 30 years of practice include ‘electric shock with a high voltage’, ‘somebody sticking a very hot iron into my face’ and ‘somebody putting a red hot nail into one area of my face’.
“It is a very specific disease and only affects one specific branch of one side.
“It is very often misdiagnosed with other types of facial pain like tension headaches.
“Trigeminal neuralgia is most probably the most excruciatingly painful condition that I have ever encountered as a Head & Neck clinician.”
Charlotte said she ‘still gets pains’ and knows she will require some sort of treatment again in the future.
However, she said she won’t let it ‘rule’ her, saying she ‘can’t live in fear’.
“I’m gonna seize the day and push myself and that’s what I’ve done,” she said defiantly.