After having a major health scare last year, Susannah Constantine is concentrating on her wellbeing and taking each day as it comes
WORDS: SUE CRAWFORD PHOTOS: MIKE LAWN/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK, JIM HOLDEN / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO, BBC, PA, ALAN DAVIDSON/REX/ SHUTTERSTOCK, SUSANNAH CONSTANTINE INSTAGRAM
FIGHTING FIT
When she suffered an attack of tinnitus and pins and needles in her arm last year, presenter Susannah Constantine simply put it down to getting older. But when her symptoms worsened, she was rushed to hospital and given the shocking news that she was actually fortunate to be alive. After being seen by a neurosurgeon, Susannah was told that she needed immediate surgery and without it, there was a serious risk of her suffering a brain haemorrhage or paralysis.
Speaking to OK! for the first time about her terrifying health scare, Susannah, 61, recalls how she was told by doctors, “you are really lucky to be alive”.
“They said, ‘It’s Hobson’s choice. If you don’t have the operation, you’ve got a one in three chance of having a brain haemorrhage, being paralysed or having a stroke. If you do have surgery, you’ve got a one in 10 chance of the same things happening during the operation,’” she says.
“I had these two amazing surgeons. They said the operation could take anything up to 17 hours, they didn’t know because they’d never done it before.”
Susannah was told she had a venous fistula – an irregular connection between an artery and a vein. Left untreated, it could cause heart failure and blood clots.
The mum-of-three (she has three children – Joe, 25, Esme, 22, and CeCe, 20 – with her husband, Danish businessman Sten Bertelsen) put a message on social media last summer saying she had been rushed to hospital with a “withered arm” and posted a picture of it connected to a cannula. It’s only now that she is finally revealing the true extent of everything she went through.
“I had a health scare and a pretty major operation,” she explains. “It was a very rare thing where I had a leak – the arteries were bleeding into the capillaries and trapping the spinal cord, and affecting my brain.
“I was losing the use of my left arm – I had pins and needles and a lot of pain – my left eye was swollen and I had pulsatile tinnitus, where you hear a whooshing noise in your head. But I just thought I was getting old.
“I went for an MRI scan which was never followed up, so I was just living with it,
