Former Hollyoaks star Ali Bastian has revealed she has been diagnosed with stage 2 breast cancer at the age of 42.
Ali, who finished in third place on Strictly Come Dancing in 2009, said she found the lump when breastfeeding her daughter Isabella.
She is now undergoing weekly chemotherapy sessions and will have a mastectomy and radiotherapy treatment next year.
Doctors initially thought the lump could have been a blocked duct and prescribed her antibiotics.
After the medication didn’t relieve the soreness, further tests found the actress has cancer and she was diagnosed in June.
Ali Bastian cancer diagnosis
Speaking to OK!, Ali said: “It was a total shock. I have mornings when I wake up and I’ve forgotten and then suddenly I remember. I’m still trying to process it.”
Ali and her director husband David O’Mahony share two daughters – Isla, three, and Isabella, one.
I have mornings when I wake up and I’ve forgotten and then suddenly I remember.
David told the publication: “I was with the kids and Ali stuck her head round the door and said that cancerous cells had turned up in the biopsy.
“She said it in the most subtle way so the girls didn’t twig. I could see how scared and in shock she was. It’s so tempting to try and ‘positive’ your way through news like this but it just hit us like a sledgehammer. I just had a feeling of it being so unfair that Ali had been dealt this hand.”
But Ali said she is feeling positive and is looking forward to returning to acting once she is “out of the other side”.
Ali’s career so far
Ali is best known for playing Becca Dean on Channel 4 soap Hollyoaks from 2001 to 2007.
She said her former co-stars Sarah Jayne Dunn, Carley Stenson and Jodi Albert have been supporting her.
Ali went on to join the cast of The Bill as PC Sally Armstrong from 2007 to 2009.
Most recently, she picked up a series regular role in Doctors in 2019.
She and her family moved to Ireland earlier this year and she is being treated by the Orchid Centre at Cork University Hospital.
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