Former Emmerdale actress Leah Bracknell has been praised by Lorraine viewers after she appeared on the show to discuss living with incurable lung cancer.
The actress was diagnosed 15 months ago, and she was told this August that her medical treatment was not working.
“I feel alright, I feel lucky, fortunate and blessed,” the 54-year-old said. “I have a cold but it’s nothing more sinister than that.”
Continuing in the positive vein, she added: “Your priorities shift [when you have cancer], you forget about the minutiae of life – I don’t have time to get stressed.
“The key is how grateful I am for being alive. I’m really grateful for this glass of water, or to see the sun in the morning. You can do it by faking it at first.
Speaking about doctors’ prognosis, she added: “They said there’s no options but I’m still alive and I’m not going to embrace anything else, full stop. I’m alive until I’m not.
“Hope is a really good thing to have in your heart.
“It’s actually the support that is so magical, to have people say ‘I’m rooting for you’,” she added.
“It’s medicine you can’t bottle.”
In a separate interview with The Mirror, the mum-of-two said she was looking forward to spending a quiet Christmas with her close family.
“We haven’t arranged anything, it will all be very last minute,” the 54-year-old told Lorraine. “So, in other words, it will be exactly the same as it always is.
“I could think, ‘We are going to have the biggest Christmas tree, people will be able to see it in Cornwall, and we’ll have reindeer on the roof’.
“But that would be like saying, this might be my last Christmas, get through it and I’ll have done that. I don’t think like that.”