George Alagiah has tested positive for coronavirus while battling bowel cancer
Image Source/ BBC
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The BBC presenter – who is living with bowel cancer – has revealed he has a “mild dose” of COVID-19, which has already killed over 36,000 people worldwide since December, and although he’s in the vulnerable category, he feels “quite strong” because his fight with cancer has mentally prepared him for the worst.
Speaking on Tuesday’s (31.03.20) news bulletin, he said:
‘If I can live with cancer, I can certainly live with COVID-19.
‘I don’t want to trivialise because I seem to have had a mild dose, but actually, the very fact that we are living with cancer I think gives us an edge.
‘We’ve confronted those difficult, dark moments in our life. And in some ways, I think that we, those of us living with cancer, are stronger because we kind of know what it is like to go into something where the outcomes are uncertain.
‘And I certainly feel that having had that experience, in my case six years as a cancer patient, I went into this feeling actually quite strong’.
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The 64-year-old newsreader was first diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2014 and he was later told the disease had spread to his liver and lymph nodes.
He then went on to have 17 rounds of chemotherapy and five operations.
He was then given the all-clear a year later and returned to work 18 months later, but he revealed in January 2018 the disease had returned and it was terminal.
George recently said he was upset at the thought of leaving his wife Frances Robathan and their two sons Adam and Matthew but he isn’t scared of dying.
He said:
‘No I’m not [scared], actually. I’m not for myself, that much I know, and I’ve had to work through it in my head because I’m one scan away from perhaps knowing that that thing is going to happen sooner rather than later.
‘I do find it very, very difficult when I think of my loved ones and in particular the woman who has loved me and who I love over the years since 1976, Frances, so that part of it is difficult’.
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