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Michaela says she'd been through a terrible year (Image: Rowan Griffiths / Daily Mirror )
Springwatch star Michaela Strachan, who is about to return to our screen in Dancing On Ice, opened up on a “relentlessly sad” year which saw her surrounded by tragedy. Speaking on the On The Marie Curie Couch podcast, the 58-year-old presenter said that the previous year or so had been “really sad.”
“There was a lot of loss in my close circle of family and friends, starting off at the beginning of the year with the passing of my sister-in-law who died of cancer … she suffered for three years and eventually passed in January,” she said.
She explained that her partner Nick Chevallier’s previous wife had died from cancer, which made the loss of his sister especially poignant for his family.
Michaela is set to appear on ITV's Dancing On Ice (Image: WireImage)
Nick’s best friend had also died of a heart attack at around the same time, Michaela recalled, making it an even more difficult time. Not long after that, Michaela added, the son of one of her close friends died at the age of just 35. It was “heartbreakingly sad to watch a mother go through that kind of loss”, she said.
She said her friend was the kind of person that lit up a room, adding: “But that light will never be as bright again because she's lost a child. And knowing how to help and be there for that friend was very difficult.”
But perhaps the most difficult loss for Michaela was her close friend Lucy. “She had a very similar breast cancer to myself,” she said. “She had a very similar diagnosis to myself and they said ‘We've caught it early. It's a small bit of cancer in one breast. We'll do a mastectomy. We'll put you on Tamoxifen.You'll be fine’.
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Michaela went through her own cancer battle in 2014 (Image: BBC/Jo Charlesworth)
“Which is exactly the same as I had," Michaela said. "And here I am 10 years later and I am fine. My friend wasn't so lucky and hers came back and it spread and we lost her last year.
“And so I walked that journey with my friend, Lucy. And so that hit me really hard. Losing Lucy hit me hard.”
Michaela said that, having lived through cancer herself, she felt as if she was able to “get it right,’ when it came to supporting her friend Lucy: "She was given three months to a year and she lived over a year.
“So she exceeded the length that she was given. And knowing how to be with her and with her family was really difficult, very difficult. But with her, I felt I got it right.”
English (US) ·