Anastacia thought she had a brain tumour when she started the menopause.
Anastacia thought she had a brain tumour when the menopause started to kick in
The 55-year-old pop singer began experiencing worrying symptoms like brain fog and thought she was just tired but then diagnosed herself with a tumour before finding out that it was all caused by her hormones.
Speaking on the 'White Wine Question Time', she told Kate Thornton: "I didn’t know my exhaustion; I didn’t know my brain fog. I didn’t know all the things – I just thought I was tired.
“I was diagnosing myself but had no idea any of this was hormone related. I guess I was waiting for that ball to drop. My ball was, I thought I had a brain tumour and life was going horrible, and I was really, really scared.
“When I got all of these other things checked out, this guy in Switzerland was like, ‘I think you’re going through some hormone stuff.’
“I told him, ‘It doesn’t feel anything like that, I have hot flashes and I’m okay with that.’
“In my head, I had no idea the things I was going through were actually in the list (of menopause symptoms) because it’s a long list.”
Meanwhile, the 'I'm Outta Love' hitmaker battled breast cancer in the early 2000s but then underwent a double mastectomy after being diagnosed with the disease again a decade later and insisted that she felt "empowered" in her decision because she now knows that she will never have to go through it again.
She said: "I had...my cancer never got to my lymph nodes, so it never got inside my body, it stayed localised. I never had to take the meds because I was too young for the first cancer. For the second cancer, my detection was also earlier than my DCIS that they were able to know that it was cancerous but wanted to take it out and lumpectomy it.
"And then they wanted to give me chemo, but I didn't want a third time to take me out. I'd had 10 years of having my own breasts, thank you very much for that but bilaterally they found that it was in the other breast, and I said they could take them.
"Right now, I know I'm gonna live and know that I didn't die from breast cancer. I'm really grateful for the doctors and the scans every six months but I didn't wanna go through them anymore. I can make that decision and I know it's a hard one to make for a woman, but I also felt way more empowered in making that decision in the time that I was healthy and just had to do the surgeries. They weren't easy and the transition and the lack of female you feel, all of that was an ebb and flow. But to know that cancer is never going to be talked about when it comes to breast cancer...it's gone, and I loved that part. That was gone, the scars were there but I didn't care."
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