Paul Burrell breaks down in tears as he prepares for his prostate cancer treatment, fearing he will be a “mess for a very long time”.
Arriving at hospital to meet his consultant and have a pre-op assessment, Paul admits: “It’s a little bit scary.”
He adds: “I’m apprehensive because I don’t know what to expect and I don’t know what the outcome is going to be.”
After his meeting at the Christie Hospital, Manchester, the ex-footman to the late Queen and butler to Princess Diana admits to viewers of ITV’s Lorraine tomorrow that it was “a lot to take in”.
The dad-of-two says: “I’ll go for a two-hour procedure and they will inject radium into my prostate.
“My recovery will be for the rest of that week. And then for the next three weeks I will have to go to radiotherapy appointments – to kill it from the outside as well as the inside.
“Hopefully at the end of that period I’ll be all clear.”
But then, he said, would come the “battle with the hormone treatment”, to shrink both the cancer and the prostate gland itself.
Paul, 64, adds after talking to the consultant: “I get so emotional because of the hormone therapy, which she said I’ll have to continue after the operation.
“I’m going to be a mess for a very long time. But you have to trade off certain things to get to a point of living.”
Welling up with emotion discussing the future with husband Graham Cooper, 60, Paul adds: “This isn’t about me is it? It’s about the big picture – it’s about my hubby, Coop.
“It’s about our relationship, the way forward. I had to talk about all of that.”
Paul was asymptomatic, but a blood test last summer for a TV show revealed high levels of PSA, a chemical released by the prostate gland.
A follow-up MRI scan revealed prostate cancer. On tomorrow's Lorraine, he also urges men to get the PSA test, used to screen for prostate cancer.
He says: “Guys, out there. Go and have a simple blood test. You owe it to your partners. You owe it to your families.
"You owe it to the people who love you. Just go and have a simple test.
“If they catch it early, you’ll get through it too, like me.”
Later, he visits Can-Survive UK, a charity that provides support to people and families touched by cancer.
There he meets two cancer survivors, Maurice and Winston, who share their own experiences of overcoming the disease and offer Paul reassurance.
They are members of the BAME community, who are twice as likely to get a prostate cancer diagnosis.
One in four men in the Black community will get prostate cancer, says Paul. Like Paul, Winston was asymptomatic. Asked why men don’t discuss prostate cancer more openly, Maurice tells Paul: “I think there’s a stigma, an embarrassment.
“And growing up in the Caribbean community, we are always told that men are supposed to be strong and not talk about things. And I think that’s part of the problem.
“As we all know, a problem shared is a problem halved.”
Paul, who has called himself Princess Diana’s “rock”, has said he wants to share certain secrets with her sons, hoping to heal their rift.
But he told of his fears he will run out of time to tell Princes William and Harry “the truth”.
Paul added: “She confided in me.”
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