TV star Davina McCall’s brain surgeon has shed light on her tough brain tumour operation – likening the procedure to diffusing a bomb.
The surgeon who removed a 14mm colloid cyst from Davina‘s brain has spoken out in a joint interview with The Masked Singer star. In November 2024, Davina, 57, told fans that she was undergoing surgery to remove a benign tumour – an incredibly rare colloid cyst which affects three in one million people – from her brain. It had been discovered in August 2023, during a health scan at London’s OneWellbeck Clinic.
Davina and her consultant neurosurgeon, Kevin O’Neill, have now revealed how the discovery of the cyst presented some serious health risks – and could even have triggered sudden death.
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Sam Simpson/Dave Benett/Getty Images for Garnier)
If the operation had gone wrong, Davina could have suffered a stroke or “been unable to hold a short-term memory beyond five minutes”. If it had been left undiscovered, or the presenter had chosen not to have it removed, there was a 1 per cent chance that she might drop dead with no warning and without a chance to say goodbye to her loved ones, they said in an interview with The Times.
O’Neill was the second of three doctors she approached for advice about how to deal with the cyst, which would have been present since birth. The first expert suggested endoscopic surgery, but O’Neill – who Davina had met through Caprice after he treated her for concussion she sustained while competing on The Jump – said it would be “better to open her head right up” to lessen potential damage to healthy brain tissue.
During the five hour operation, O’Neill “opened up her skull from ear to ear and spent five hours removing the 14mm colloid cyst sitting in the third ventricle, between the left and right hemispheres of her brain.”
O’Neill elaborated: “The operation was like a layer cake: scalp, then the skull, then the journey down into the centre of the brain, step by step getting closer to the actual end point of getting the cyst out. Like defusing a bomb, you cut one wire, then down into the next bit, cut that wire, then you get to the last wire, the 14mm cyst.”
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Getty Images for the NTA’s)
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Michael Douglas/Instagram)
Thankfully the cyst was full of fluid, and was ‘popped’ before the sack removed, preventing it from refilling and causing more problems. Davina admitted that she found the experience of undergoing brain surgery an exercise in “letting go”. She wrote letters for her three grown-up children, and got her house in order should she not make it out of the operating theatre alive, or having suffered a catastrophic brain injury.
She said: “I’ve always been a grateful person but this brain operation has supersized my gratitude. I remember saying, ‘If it’s a success, it will change my life for ever, in a really good way.’
“The risks were better than living with the 1 per cent fear of dropping dead at any moment.” In the emotional video, Davina posted in November, she said: “I’m posting this. It will be Friday morning, and I’m doing it because a few months ago, I did a menopause talk for a company, and they offered me a health scan in return, which I thought I was going to ace, but it turned out I had a benign brain tumour called a colloid cyst, which is very rare, three in a million. And so I slightly put my head in the sand for a while, and then I saw quite a few neuro surgeons. I got lots of opinions, and I realised that I have to get it taken out.”
Davina described it as a “big” tumour, 14 mm wide, adding: “It needs to come out, because if it grows, it would be bad.”
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