Tumours threatened my singing, my sight and my life… but now The Voice is back

Applause filled the packed theatre. I should have felt euphoric, surrounded by loyal fans taking delight in the return of The Voice. But as the clapping slowed and the expectant audience readied themselves for my next song, I walked off stage.

My every thought was consumed by the blackness I felt descending. The sea of faces in front of me were a swirling mass. I was going to pass out.

Startled stage hands rushed to my side as I searched in my pocket for the tablets that have, for the past two years, become my lifeline. Then I pushed my way through a side door, gulping in the fresh air.

It was the first of May this year. In that moment I was so angry, upset and frustrated that I looked heavenwards and shouted: ‘When is this going to end?’

I had survived two life-saving operations to remove a pituitary tumour, undergone weeks of radiotherapy, suffered the indignity of losing my hair, fought my way back to fitness and yet here I was, my life and career dependent on a daily regime of drugs.

I was fed up to the back teeth but as I looked around me I realised that this was the stark reality of my life now.

The tumours and resulting surgery had damaged my pituitary gland, which controls hormones released into the body including cortisol, the adrenal stress hormone which responds to stress and anxiety.

Because my body can’t produce it naturally, I have to mimic it by taking hydrocortisone tablets three times a day. In my line of work, performing before thousands of people means huge amounts of stress and getting the level right in those situations can be tricky. But without them my blood pressure and energy levels plummet.

The worst-case scenario is that my heart eventually stops – but in this case, as in most when I’ve forgotten to take a tablet or don’t take enough, I begin to feel dizzy and faint.
Within ten minutes of walking off stage I was fine again. Thankfully, the musical director had realised something was wrong and had the orchestra launch into a long instrumental. I walked back on stage, carried on singing and no one in the audience knew anything had ever been wrong.

As well as the hydrocortisone, I have a really horrible, oily injection of Nebido, a testosterone hormone, needed for sex drive, maintaining male characteristics and helping with energy levels. My doctor gives me one of these injections every ten weeks.

 I also have a daily growth hormone, Norditropin SimpleXx which I need to stop me feeling too tired or depressed as well as to balance my weight and my concentration. I use an EpiPen – similar to one used by diabetics – to inject myself in my stomach or thigh.

 Ironically, I need the drugs to stay alive, but they carry risks. I have to undergo regular blood tests because the testosterone can increase the chance of developing prostate cancer, while the growth hormone can increase the chance of breast, colon and bowel cancer.

I never imagined when I started getting bad headaches in 2003 how much my life was going to change. They were harsher than anything I’d ever experienced – a real monster behind the eyes – and I’d get them at least once a week.

I saw a neurologist in Manchester who said it was stress and told me not to worry, so I carried on touring and recording and just lived with it.

But at the end of the summer of 2006, I was in Los Angeles playing tennis with a friend and I realised I could not see the ball.

I went for tests at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre there and could hardly see the consultant’s face as he told me I had a large benign tumour, part of which was filling the frontal cavity of my skull, while the other part was pushing into the top of my nose and pressing the nerve to my eyes, causing my vision to deteriorate.

That night I stood on the balcony of my tenth-floor room at the Four Seasons hotel, full of dark thoughts. I self-pityingly asked, ‘Why me’ and thought about jumping.

 If it hadn’t been for my young daughters Rebecca, who is now 15, and Hannah, nine, who I knew were waiting for me back home in the UK, I honestly believe I might have done it.

I was told the condition affects four in every 100,000 people, but because the tumour is usually small and difficult to detect, it is often undiagnosed because symptoms such as headache, poor vision and nausea are attributed, as mine were, to stress.

 When I returned home, surgeons at St George’s Hospital in London removed the tumour through my nose. There was a lot of swelling around my face afterwards and it was painful for a few weeks, but slowly I began to feel normal again. The blinding headaches that had blighted my life were gone.

By the following March I was ready to do a 22-city tour and believed my life was back on track. Unfortunately, although I didn’t know it at the time, the surgeons had not managed to remove all of the tumour – and it had grown back.

I remember so clearly waking up one morning in October 2007 with the worst headache I have ever had. I was burying my face in the pillow and screaming, then being sick. I couldn’t see, my temperature was nearly 40C and I thought this was it. I was dying.
My personal assistant Victoria Davis arrived at my house for work and called an ambulance straight away. She told me later that I looked grey.

Everything was a blur but I could hear one voice saying, ‘Stay with us, Russell, stay with us, mate’ over and over again. It wasn’t until I got out of intensive care a week later I learned it was the ambulance medic. He was the one who’d kept me going when I wanted to give up and die I was in so much pain.

The second tumour had grown to such an extent it had begun to haemorrhage. It was also pressing on my optic nerve and there was a danger I could go blind if it wasn’t removed straight away.

Before I agreed to the operation, which had to be done within 24 hours, I wanted to see my daughters, who live nearby with their mum Helen. At that stage I wasn’t convinced I was going to pull through.

This time the surgeons went in through my upper lip and along the floor of the nasal cavity to access the tumour. The pain afterwards was horrendous and I could barely lift my head from the pillow, let alone walk a few steps. I was completely drained.

But I was soon convinced – maybe it was the euphoria of surviving – I’d be back singing within eight weeks and everything would carry on as normal.

I had no idea how long it was really going to take me to recover, and I am very lucky that I have some great friends who put up with me when I felt moody or depressed, and were a huge support.

Doctors do not know what causes pituitary tumours, but they know they can regrow, so I needed a five-week course of radiotherapy – to try to reduce any potential growth – which started on January 2, last year.

 The stark reality of the treatment I was going to have to endure five days a week hit me when I went for the first session. I was going to have radiation, via lasers, on four points – front, back and each side of my head. Measurements have to be absolutely exact to the millimetre, otherwise it can be catastrophic.

I lay on an operating table, and was securely attached to brackets so that my head couldn’t move.

Then a Perspex box-like contraption was fitted to the contours of my face and a further Perspex box fitted over that, from the neck up – all of it designed to stop any movement of my head.

The actual ‘zapping’ lasted only a couple of minutes but it was absolutely terrifying. I felt claustrophobic and couldn’t imagine how I was going to endure this for five weeks, never mind relax as the nurses kept telling me to do.

Weirdly though, it just became routine after a week.

What I hadn’t been prepared for were the side effects. I felt as if I had flu constantly, every muscle ached, I couldn’t move out of the chair without feeling exhausted. Unscrewing the top of a water bottle would knock me out for the day. Then one day I was washing my hair and big clumps started falling out.

I’m 6ft 1in and have always been very physically fit. I play tennis, box and work out. I took pride in my appearance, and overnight I looked like Friar Tuck, with little clumps of hair and felt like an old man.

I looked in the mirror in despair. At that moment I didn’t care that the treatment could have been saving my life.

To make matters worse, a side effect of radiotherapy is inflammation of the skin, so I had to take steroids to counteract it.

And of course, the steroids had their own side effects.

 Not only did I put on two stone in five weeks – going up to 16½ stone – they made me incredibly angry and aggressive and I’d fly off the handle at the smallest thing. Rebecca and Hannah were terrific – they became very protective of me and if anyone came over to say hello when I was out, they would close ranks around me as a kind of warning.

There were days when I felt so sick and miserable I didn’t want to go on, and days when the girls – who split their time between my home and my former wife Helen’s – would come over and I felt confused and unable to concentrate.
But they were so loving and, in a funny way, I think it has improved our relationship and brought us closer.
I didn’t think about my singing once during this time. I didn’t have the mental capacity to take it on board. I knew that I had to divide my recovery into stages – it was the only way I was going to be able to deal with it.

The first stage was making it through radiotherapy, and the second was getting fit – I was in the gym the day after I finished treatment. I could barely do five minutes on the running machine and lifting weights that were just 1kg nearly killed me, but I felt as if I was getting my control back, something I had lost ever since my tumour had been diagnosed.

 It took ten months to get anywhere near my old physical fitness again. I began watching my diet and lost the weight I’d gained, getting back to my normal 14½ stone.

The next stage was my voice. I can’t tell you how much effort and time I have put into getting myself back to being the singer I once was, and for more than a year I was not even convinced I could.

Trying to sing classical music, such as Nessun Dorma which requires you to really use your diaphragm and breathing, was impossible because the pressure generated in my head to reach the higher and more powerful notes was agony. I just could not deal with it. I’d feel dizzy and my vision would become affected.

I had to turn to Frank Sinatra, soul, and easy-listening music to be able to sing at all. I knew the chances were that I was never going to be able to sing as I used to.

But having my physical fitness back meant I could focus on my voice. I practised every day with my voice coach and amazingly, after all I have been through, the tumour seems to have opened up the nasal cavity and cleared my sinuses, which has had a beneficial effect on my voice.

I believe I have a better voice now than I did before and I’d like to think it’s my reward for the bad times.

I have signed a new contract with Sony and will be bringing out a classical album at the end of 2010 as I celebrate my tenth anniversary in the record industry.

It feels as if I am starting my life again. Being ill has forced me to have a new beginning, but one that I hope will, ultimately, make me a better performer.

That said, there are still days when I have mood swings because my hormone levels may fluctuate. At the moment I am using up too much testosterone – in five weeks I am using what should last ten – and doctors have no idea why.

Travelling can be a nightmare because my injection timetable may not coincide with my work one. If I go to Malaysia, for instance, I take my assistant Gary along because if I was sick I may not be able to explain quickly enough the problem to a foreign doctor who doesn’t speak English, whereas Gary knows what to do.

Although I have to carry a bag full of drugs and needles through customs, no one bats an eyelid whereas before I used to get stopped and searched all the time.

I feel as if I have been given a second chance at life and I want to grab it with both hands.
I appreciate my friends and family more but I’m less certain about having a long-term relationship.

I have had to become quite selfish in the way I view my life. I have my children, my singing and my health to focus on and it doesn’t leave a lot of energy for anyone else at the moment.

I want to prove to any of those that doubt me within my industry that the difficult years are now behind me.

• Russell Watson – Return Of The Voice: Tonight is on ITV1, on Friday, December 4, at 8pm

Photo by David Poole

Source: Daily Mail