Actor Olivia Williams Opens Up About Her 4-Year Battle To Get A Cancer Diagnosis

The results of the biopsy arrive by email. I am sitting in my trailer in LA, waiting for the knock to tell me to go to set, where I am to film an intense farewell scene with Oscar-winning actor JK Simmons. He is playing my husband, performing his part with the kind of restrained delicacy that breaks your heart. I, meanwhile, have been performing my role with a squelching sound not unlike a Wellington boot being pulled out of Thames mud at low tide.

After the first few doctors have turned you away, even the most supportive friends and family cannot keep you company. In the consulting room, you are trying to convince everyone that you are sick. Everywhere else, you’re pretending that you’re fine.

But after a year of drugs and scrutiny from the specialist lupus clinic, I was discharged from their care with a note to my GP that I definitely did not have lupus. A new symptom, diarrhoea of an inconceivable consistency and quantity, suggested I should be treated for depression, IBS and amenorrhea. For it is a truth universally acknowledged that a middle-aged woman in possession of a red face and a dodgy tummy must be a perimenopausal nutjob.

The results came back in German, along with a short email in English. Barrett’s mucosa. I plonked myself down in the make-up chair at work and confidently announced, “I definitely don’t have cancer” – not knowing that both procedures had stopped short of the organ-dense digestive hub between the endoscopy and the colonoscopy. I’d gone to the right address, but failed to look up the back stairs.

I didn’t hear the “might”. I only heard “not cancer”. I stood up and said, thank you, but I can’t go to hospital today, I have to be on set in 40 minutes. From the look on her face, I sensed that this response was not rational. She barred my way, and escorted me to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. I was scheduled for the seven-hour surgery on my 50th birthday. I turned up at King’s College Hospital in London feeling it was the best day of my life. Not the party I’d planned to mark my midcentury, but if it gave me a chance of being alive on my 51st birthday, I’d embrace it.

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