Dan Walker has opened up about receiving a false cancer diagnosis while on a work assignment in Poland.
The sports broadcaster has discussed experiencing ill health while covering the Uefa European Championships in 2012.
In a conversation with presenter Kate Thornton on her podcast White Wine Question Time, Walker recalled feeling “a slightly strange lump in my stomach” and seeking medical attention.
“I felt my breathing was changing a little bit and I went to the medical centre in the broadcast centre there, and within two and a half minutes I was in the back of an ambulance on my way to a Polish A&E,” he explained.
Match of the Day editor Richard Hughes was with Walker at the time and “dropped everything” to accompany him to the hospital, where he was met with frightening news.
Walker continued: “You know times in life when you think sometimes you just need someone to hold your hand?
“It did get a bit scary that night – about two o’clock in the morning a Polish consultant came in and told me that I had cancer because they’d seen some shadows on my kidney, and he used the word tumour.”
Dan Walker— (PA)
Walker chose not to tell his wife at home about the doctor’s news until he was able to verify it with a more senior member of staff.
“I don’t mean this to sound rude in any way, but is the head consultant around, and can they have a look at the scan?” he recalls asking a staff member. “Because if I tell my family I’ve got cancer, I need to know 100 per cent.”
Hours later, he got the all-clear from the consultant: “At eight o’clock in the morning, she came in and she said it’s not a tumour.”
Though his illness wasn’t cancer, treatment was gruelling nonetheless as he recalled having eight litres of saline pumped into him to help restart his kidney function, which caused extensive bloating.
“The next day I woke up and I went to the bathroom mirror, part of me wishes I had taken a photograph but I didn’t because my face, my head was about twice the size that it is at the moment.
“Every part of my body was swollen and I couldn’t even get my boxer shorts on.”
Dan Walker after his bike collision— (Instagram / Dan Walker)
Walker, who hosted on the BBC before moving to Channel 5 in 2022, likened the emotional impact of the experience to his cycling collision in February which left him unconscious for 20 minutes.
“In the same way, when I had my bike accident in February this year, and I was out for the count for 20 minutes, I had a weird out-of-body experience that day and I was watching myself on the floor looking at the paramedics,” he told Thornton in the episode, published on Friday (24 November).
“I felt – and this is going to sound really strange and I have no way of explaining it to you – but I almost felt like I was sucked back into my body and looking out of my eyes again and the circle got bigger and bigger, and I could see them and not hear them before the sound came back into my brain.”
