Fans have been following Coronation Street icon Beverley Callard’s brave cancer journey since she announced her diagnosis back in February.
Beverley received the news after relocating to Dublin. ‘Literally 15 to 20 minutes before’ commencing filming her first scenes for Irish soap Fair City, she received a call from her consultant, asking her to return to England for urgent treatment, although, thankfully doctors were confident that they’d caught her cancer early.
‘I’d had some tests just before I left the UK and literally 15, 20 minutes before [her first scene]. I was in my dressing room at Fair City, getting ready to go on, and I was quite nervous and thinking, ‘I hope everybody thinks I’m all right,’ she told host Patrick Kielty while appearing on RTÉ’s The Late Late Show, where she announced the news.
‘And my consultant rang me and said, ‘You’ve got to come back to the UK.’ I said, ‘Well I can’t possibly, I’ve just taken a new job, I’m away for a month’.’
‘I was diagnosed with breast cancer,’ she said, before calming the shocked audience: ‘But I’m fine. I’m absolutely fine.
‘My head was a bit mashed for the first few days. It’s very early stages, and I’m along with, thousands of other women as well. I travel back to the UK tomorrow, just for a couple of weeks. They’re going to test lymph nodes and lymph glands and all that.
‘I need an operation and some radiotherapy, and then I’m coming back to Fair City, so I will be back in just a few weeks.’
Beverley took to Instagram to provide an update, as she’s done throughout her journey, with a mixed bag of news, captioning the post: ‘A mixed day today, some positive and some not so positive! Getting ready to go back to work next week but first…2 hospital appointments’
‘Well, I’ve got sort of good news, well definitely good news, but maybe bad news, but I’m not sure yet,’ she said in the video.
‘The good news is my new script arrived yesterday in preparation for me going back to work at the end of next week. So I’m excited, I can’t wait to go back to work, and the scripts are fantastic.’
She then revealed that she’d been having some troubling symptoms.
‘But the negative side is I’ve had quite a lot of pain in my right leg. I had to go to the GP today and it’s a suspected blood clot which can happen if you’ve got cancer and if you’ve had surgery.
‘Now it might not be, but you know you think, ‘Oh no, please, no, no, no, no, no, no.’
‘So I’ve got to be at a hospital in the morning at 8am to have tests and all sorts of things done about that. And then I see the radiotherapist at 1.15.
‘So that’s today’s news, but I’m feeling fine, I’m feeling quite positive. So I thank you so much for all your wonderful messages and I’m listening to everybody and trying to take everything in.’
She provided another update after her appointment, captioning the video: ‘Well that was a long day! Lots of tests and scans and more tests… followed by a rather chaotic meeting of the radiotherapy team! The plan is starting to come together but I’m just anxious to get started now…’
Sat in her hospital bed, Beverley said: ‘So far, blood pressure done. That’s high, of course, because I’m nervous.
‘They’ve taken blood, blood oxygen levels, and now they’re going to see if they can fit me in for a scan before they get the results of the blood test, because they’re taking about 3 hours.’
The video then transitioned to Beverley at home, in between appointments.
‘Okay, just got back from the first hospital, thank you so much to Roisin and to Jenny, they were fantastic there,’ she began.
‘Good news is it’s definitely not a blood clot. They did an ultrasound, they did everything, every test going they did. And apparently…wait for it…it’s a cyst, but it’s quite common.
‘Not pleased I’ve got something quite common, but there we go,’ she joked.
‘It’s, at the back of my knee there, well there, I had this pain and I didn’t think it was anything, but it persisted. So then I thought I should go and obviously, I was panicked a little bit yesterday, but I’m okay.
‘So now, in 5 minutes I set off to go meet the radiotherapist for the first time.’
The video then transitioned again as Beverley updated viewers on her final visit of the day: ‘Well I’m back home now after my visit to St Luke’s to see the radiotherapist.
‘It was all a bit chaotic because their computer system went down so there were lots of people there waiting to go in.
‘I saw Professor Armstrong and he just said, it was quite brief, but he just said that I’ll be having 10 days of radiotherapy, 5 consecutive days, then a weekend off, then five more days.
‘I’m not sure when it starts yet, they’ll let me know. They will send me an appointment to have a body scan and do the mapping, that’s the first thing, and they’ll let me know soon when that begins. So really that’s all I know at the moment.
‘I said ‘could I still go to work?’ and he said yeah, he thought so but don’t move any furniture, which I do have a tendency to do, but there we go. So, that’s as much as I know at the moment.’
