Jonny Ruffo has shared the details of his battle with a brain tumour, revealing he’d had symptoms for a while but put them down to his lifestyle, or even depression.
Talking to Carrie Bickmore on The Project Ruffo talked about how heading to the hospital, when he had a really bad headache, actually saved his life.
“The surgeon said if I hadn’t gone to the hospital that night I would have died in my sleep that night. It is just sheer luck that I went in when I did and everything happened the way it did otherwise I wouldn’t be here,” he said.
From X Factor to Dancing with the Stars and then Home and Away, 29-year-old Ruffo has been living a bit of the high-life, and admitted that he thought his symptoms might have even been a hangover.
“Anything that may have been a symptom, I just put down to normal life. Headaches — I played sports and copped a million and one knocks in the head,” he said “You never thought — it may have attributed to it or not. You wake up with a bit of a hangover and you think, ‘it is a headache from having a drink,’ but this particular time I hadn’t gone out at all and I just had a really bad headache. It grew from that.”
But it was a different symptom that he did take notice of that saved his life.
“My sentences were not making any sense. My words were jumbled up. It became alarming to [my girlfriend]. She said maybe we should go to the emergency department.”
Even the doctors initially thought it was a migraine. However test soon revealed the truth and he underwent surgery.
Read more: Johnny Ruffo posts tribute to doctors trying to save his life.
“It took about eight hours to remove the tumour. It was seven centimetres so it was really quite large in my right frontal lobe. You can see the scar.
“They knew it was a tumour. They could only remove 95 percent of it due to where it was positioned, close to the nerve endings, I believe. So the remaining five per cent they decided radio therapy and chemo therapy was the best option for it.
“The surgeon said it could have been potentially growing from two years to 10 years. Initially I thought maybe I was a bit depressed so I’d even gone to the doctor. The doctor said all the symptoms seem like it is depression.
“After having found the tumour, the neurosurgeon said it was not depression at all, it was because there was so much pressure being put on your brain it was causing all these different symptoms.”
He’s now undergoing the chemo, and says he is optimistic about the future.