Great British Bake Off co-host Sue Perkins has described how it felt like a bereavement when she was told a benign brain tumour in her pituitary gland had left her infertile.
The writer and comedian revealed the 2007 diagnosis in her memoir, Spectacles, writing: “I cried myself hoarse till my eyes ran on empty.”
In an interview, she said after the conversation with the consultant: “It really did hit me, as it hits a lot of people, I’m sure, when it’s too late, this is not going to happen. I can’t now have it as an out-of-sight, out-of-mind possibility, lurking.
“It’s just not going to happen, it’s not going to ever be part of my life. And, although I never yearned to physically have my own child, it felt like a bereavement. It really did”.
The 45-year-old, who is in a relationship with documentary-maker Anna Richardson, kept news of her diagnosis secret for eight years, breaking her silence earlier this month.
Describing how she was told the news, she said the consultant asked her if she was married, or had a boyfriend. When she replied she was gay, he told her: “Oh, OK. Well, that makes it easier. You’re infertile. You can’t have kids.”
“Does not a lesbian have a fallopian tube?” she told the Sunday Times magazine. “Am I not human, and [am] I not somebody who could be a lovely, wonderful mother?”
Perkins was diagnosed while having medical tests for another BBC show, Supersizers, and was told the growth affects the secretion of reproductive hormones.
She said, had she been diagnosed sooner, she might have conceived with the help of drugs. But she put it off, because “it’s so hard to do the right thing with a pen and a piece of paper and a set of abstract thoughts”.
“Sometimes I get into the mindset that being heterosexual is a brave new world, because you can conceive, and you work out the rest of it once you’re pregnant. For me, it just felt like I was sitting there with a pencil going, ‘what’s the best way to have a daddy? What’s the best way to have two mummies?’ And it just felt like I just had a f****** pencil in my hand, and this isn’t the way to start being a mother, and that’s what was really painful,” she said.
