Olivia Williams has opened up about her arduous journey with cancer, revealing that a delayed diagnosis has condemned her to a life never fully free of the disease. The esteemed actress, whose credits span an impressive array of projects including "The Crown," "The Sixth Sense," "Dune: Prophecy," and "The Ghost Writer," among many others, bared her soul in a recent interview with The Times.
Williams recounted her four-year odyssey of visiting ten doctors in search of answers to her perplexing symptoms—aching limbs, relentless fatigue, and persistent diarrhea. Initially misdiagnosed with lupus and perimenopause, she finally received the devastating news that she harbored a rare cancerous tumor in her pancreas.
"Had someone bloody well diagnosed me during those four long years I insisted I was unwell—when they dismissed me as menopausal, suffering from irritable bowel syndrome, or plain crazy—I chose that word deliberately because one insensitive doctor even referred me for a psychiatric evaluation," she lamented. "A single operation might have eradicated it all, allowing me to proudly declare myself cancer-free. But now, that dream is shattered forever."
As an advocate for Pancreatic Cancer UK, Williams is keen to elevate awareness about this insidious disease. Despite undergoing numerous procedures to excise the tumor, its late discovery allowed it to metastasize to her liver, with new metastases continuing to emerge, necessitating a relentless game of "whack-a-mole" whenever they resurfaced.
"I enter the hospital room at King's College with an optimistic, bright face, akin to a hopeful puppy," she said, her voice tinged with bitterness. "But then they deliver the cruel blow, and I'm left thinking, oh my God, I fell for it again. These new metastases always seem to pop up just before Christmas or in the midst of a summer holiday. For three consecutive years, they cropped up perilously close to major blood vessels, rendering them untreatable. There was a harrowing period when all we could do was sit and watch them grow."
Over the past two years, Williams has undergone four rounds of Lutathera, a targeted internal radiotherapy. "I step into a room at King's College Hospital, where individuals clad in hazardous material suits bring in a lead box containing radioactive material," she described vividly. "They inject it into me, transforming me into a walking radioactivity. It was supposed to grant me a respite from treatment, perhaps a year, maybe even two or three. In the most optimistic scenario, it might have made the metastases vanish into thin air. But, alas, that was not to be."
