Noddy Holder’s wife Suzan has spoken about her husband’s ‘horrifying’ oesophageal cancer diagnosis as she reveals he was originally ‘given six months to live.’
The Slade star, 77, shared his five-year cancer battle last week after keeping the news private because his ‘resistance’ was very low after his treatments and he didn’t want the ‘attention’.
Speaking to GB News on Thursday, Suzan urged ‘there is always hope’ for others who might be going through a similar battle.
She began: ‘Five years ago, Noddy was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer and was given six months to live, which, as you can imagine, was terrifying and horrifying.
‘But the good news is, five years later, he’s had a form of chemotherapy that was very targeted, very intense.’
Noddy Holder’s wife Suzan has spoken about her husband’s ‘horrifying’ oesophageal cancer diagnosis as she reveals he was originally ‘given six months to live’
The Slade star, 77, shared a health update last week after keeping the news private because his ‘resistance’ was low after his treatments and he didn’t want the ‘attention’ (pictured in 1972)
Suzan continued: ‘When he was given it five years ago, they told him that it was something that they hadn’t really given to anybody.
‘He was 72 when he was diagnosed and when they gave it to him, and they never make any promises with any cancer treatment, but he’s doing great.
‘We’ve decided to talk about now to raise awareness of oesophageal cancer, which is not the same as throat cancer. It’s one of the gastric cancers and it’s not something that gets a lot of attention.
‘We also want to help The Christie with the work they’re doing and the amazing treatments that they have.
‘We know we shocked some people, that’s not what we meant to do, and we don’t want to upset anybody.
‘We’re very aware that a lot of people are going through all sorts of different things and all sorts of different illnesses and we don’t have a magic answer, but we’ll do we can say to people, even with a devastating diagnosis like that, there is always hope.
‘They’re bringing on treatments all the time and this treatment that he had, has kept him healthy now for the last four and a half years.’
‘One of the reasons we kept it private was because Noddy wanted to deal with it in his own way, which was to focus and to concentrate.’
Cancer news: Speaking to GB News on Thursday, Suzan urged ‘there is always hope’ for others who might be going through a similar battle (both pictured in March)
Suzan added: ‘He’s done it all with good humour, that kind of same naughty, that mischievous person has always been like that all the way.
‘But telling other people is one of the hardest things because you see the pain you’re causing other people and the worry and we didn’t want to do that.
‘We’ve had amazing messages, lots of wonderful, wonderful supportive messages and we don’t want to keep on talking about it forever.
‘I want to be able to do the work we want to do with The Christie Hospital and raise some funds for the gastric cancer research fund.’
In an interview with The Daily Mail last week, Noddy discussed how his love of hats came in handy during his cancer treatment.
The most iconic was a flamboyant mirrored affair bought from a market. Famously, a young seller called Freddie, on the next stall, told him he wanted to be a pop star, ‘just like you, Noddy’. It was, of course, Freddie Mercury.
That hat is now in a bank vault, but Noddy has hundreds of others, collected over six decades in showbiz.
‘I’ve never really stopped wearing the hats and, as it turned out, they came in handy when I lost all my hair,’ he said.
‘It wasn’t unusual to see me with a hat, so people didn’t ask questions. No one said, ‘Gosh, Noddy, you aren’t looking well, are you ill?’
Even those friends and acquaintances who might have felt the Slade frontman wasn’t quite himself didn’t jump to the right conclusions.
‘Once, we were out with Rod Stewart and his missus. We go back a long way. He didn’t know I was ill and said, ‘We’ll get a bottle of wine’ and I said, ‘No, I’m not drinking. I’m on the fizzy water’ and he just looked at me and said, in quite an understanding way, ‘Ah, are you on a programme?’, meaning a recovery programme.’
‘That was such a rock ‘n’ roll response,’ he laughed.
In the summer of 2018, he sat in a hospital consulting room to be told that he had a malignant tumour in his oesophagus.
The indigestion he had put down to old age was a symptom of something much more deadly. He was told that he had six months to live.
‘I asked, ‘How long have I got?’ and the consultant said, ‘Six months’. There was no hope of treatment, nothing at all. I said, ‘OK then’.
‘I’m very philosophical about my life. I thought — and I remember saying it to my wife Suzan — ‘I’ve had a great life. I’ve achieved a lot, everything I ever wanted to, really. I’m not worried. If this is it, so be it’.’
In all the discussions about how things might progress — he wouldn’t be able to eat, breathing would become increasingly difficult — Noddy didn’t ask whether he would ever sing again.
‘That wasn’t something I even thought about. When you are told you have six months, it isn’t even important. You think about your family.
‘You can think ‘why me?’ but I suppose I thought ‘why not me?’. One in two of us will get cancer in our lifetimes. In the past eight years I’ve lost three best friends — two to cancer, one to a heart attack.
‘Two of them used to joke — there’s a lot of black humour in rock ‘n’ roll — about who would be first to go. I remember thinking to myself, ‘Oh well, silver cloud, I’ll see them again in Heaven’.’
‘They were rock ‘n’ roll world, my mates, not famous, but from that world, so there’s no guarantee they would have reached Heaven,’ he laughed again.
