Sir Chris Hoy’s wife Lady Sarra has revealed the guilt she felt when she hid her own illness from her husband.
As he battled stage 4 cancer, Lady Sarra Hoy discovered she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. But she didn't tell her husband Sir Chris because she felt “it wasn’t the right time” only to realise they “could cope much more than you think.”
Shortly after Sir Chris’s terminal diagnosis, Lady Sarra had been diagnosed with the illness. Explaining how she initially kept her diagnosis from her husband, she said: “It came completely out of the blue.
“I always tell Chris everything and we are always each other’s crutch in everything in life so it was very against the grain to not share it with him but I just knew it wasn’t the right time. We were trying to find stable ground having just been given this diagnosis from him.”
Speaking in their first interview together, Lady Sarra told Cat Deeley and Dermot O’Leary on ITV’s This Morning: “It’s been tough, but actually, we’ve been able to do it together. Once you’re in it, you can cope with so much more than you think.”
Determined to spread a message of hope and happiness, Sir Chris has released a new book called All That Matters.
Scotland's most decorated Olympian won six golds and a silver and was world champion 11 times. He admitted his outlook on life has changed. He recently revealed that he had been given his terminal cancer diagnosis last year and has been given between just two and four years to live.
He is also campaigning to have people take a PSA test in order to ensure early detection of prostate cancer. His appeal for earlier prostate cancer testing has prompted the Scottish Government to urge a review of screening for the killer disease.
Explaining how he found out about his own diagnosis, Sir Chris said: “I had this pain in my shoulder and it wouldn’t go away. I was 47 then, still lifting weights in the gym, still physically active. You’re used to having aches and pains but this one didn’t go away.
“I went to get the scan at the doctors surgery and they brought the scan up and said ‘there’s a tumour on your shoulder, we need to find out what the root of this is’ so I had multiple other scans and eventually the root of it was a prostate, and it was stage 4 prostate cancer which had spread to the bones.
“No symptoms, nothing to point to this diagnosis until the shoulder pain so it came out of the blue. I always prided myself as someone who would go to the doctor with illness or pain.
“As part of being an athlete, you’re used to looking after your body and being quite aware of yourself, but in this case, it was too late by the time we had actually found the diagnosis.”
Sir Chris revealed one of his first thoughts was what to tell their children Callum, 9, and Chloe, 6.
He added: “We were in the room, and we got the diagnosis and I felt sick, I felt nauseous and the room felt like it was spinning.
“I had to get up but I couldn’t sit still and it’s not the news that you can ever prepare yourself for. You can never imagine yourself in that situation and a million thoughts are running through your head.
“The first one was ‘how on earth are we going to tell the kids?’”
Sir Chris said: “Even sitting here doing this, six months ago there is no way we could have done it - it would have been too emotional. It’s having targets each day, it’s having things that you have to focus on.
“The kids are the centre of your life so that’s your purpose to get out of bed and to get on and look after them to make sure they’re okay.
“But it’s about bringing it back to the here and the now, the future doesn’t exist yet… so it’s about trying to be present, trying to appreciate the ‘now’.”
Sharing an update on his treatment, Sir Chris said: “Now, I am pain free. Everything is under control for the moment and there is a plan for the next stage of treatment.
“When the current stages stop working, we go onto the next stage.
“So you have a plan, and you adapt to the situation, you accept it and you appreciate the here and the now because none of us know what’s coming…
“Not everybody is as lucky as myself, some people don’t have as much time but for now, I am fit and healthy and I am going to crack on and hopefully raise a huge amount of money and change perceptions of stage 4 cancer. There’s a lot of life left to live.”
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