Davia McCall’s brain surgeon has revealed the details of the TV star’s tumour operation, comparing it to ‘defusing a bomb’. The medical professional, who extracted a 14-mm colloid cyst from Davina’s brain, spoke out in a joint interview with The Masked Singer celebrity.
In November 2024, Davina, 57, told fans that she was set to undergo surgery to remove an extremely rare colloid cyst – affecting three in one million individuals – from her brain. The benign tumour was identified in August 2023 during a health scan at London’s OneWellbeck Clinic.
Davina and her consultant neurosurgeon, Kevin O’Neill, have now disclosed how the detection of this cyst posed significant health threats – and could even have resulted in sudden death. If the operation had failed, Davina might have suffered a stroke or been unable to ‘hold a short-term memory beyond five minutes’.
Yet, if it had remained undetected, or if the presenter had decided against its removal, there was a risk that she could have died ‘suddenly’ without warning and without the opportunity to bid farewell to her loved ones, reports The Times.
O’Neill was the second of three doctors Davina consulted for advice on handling the cyst. The initial specialist recommended endoscopic surgery, a minimally invasive procedure in which instruments are passed through ‘small holes’ in the skull.
But, perhaps more gruesomely, O’Neill advised that it would be ‘better to open her head right up’ to minimise harm to healthy brain tissue. In an extensive five-hour procedure, he ‘opened up her skull from ear to ear’, removing the 14mm colloid cyst in the ‘third ventricle’, describing a narrow cavity in the brain.
Speaking with the publication, O’Neill said: “The operation was like a layer cake: scalp, then the skull, then the journey down into the centre of the brain.
“…Like defusing a bomb, you cut one wire, then down into the next bit, cut that wire, then you get to the last wire, the 14mm cyst, and you’re thinking, ‘S***!'”
Fortunately, the cyst, filled with fluid, was ‘popped’ before the sack was removed, averting the risk of it refilling and leading to further complications.
Davina viewed the whole ordeal as an exercise in ‘letting go’. She wrote three letters to her children, Holly, Chester and Tilly, ahead of the procedure just in case she didn’t make it out alive.
In November, before the operation, she also said: “I’m doing it because a few months ago, I did a menopause talk for a company, and they offered me a health scan in return, which I thought I was going to ace, but it turned out I had a benign brain tumour called a colloid cyst, which is very rare, three in a million.”
According to the Mirror, she then added: “And so I slightly put my head in the sand for a while, and then I saw quite a few neurosurgeons. I got lots of opinions, and I realised that I have to get it taken out.”