I was delighted to be invited to have the chats with Ryan Tubridy on The Late Late Show recently. You can check it out on the RTE Player here.

As you can imagine, I was pretty nervous about the whole thing and tried on no less than 17 outfits before settling on an old River Island dress I had only worn once before for my 30th birthday. (Which is disgraceful really, who do I think I am, Kate Middleton?) Now, of course, I’ve decided that I made all the wrong sartorial choices, but there’s not much I can do about it so am trying to let it go! I hope that someday I’ll get to go back on the show to talk about something a bit happier than cancer and troubled childhoods. Maybe I’ll be happy with my outfit on that occasion.

The experience in general was a good one. I was lucky to be first up so didn’t have to wait around for long, which is good because all I could think about ahead of time was falling down the steps when I walked onto the set. I knew that I’d be fine once I started talking but I was convinced I’d make a complete and total hames of walking on. Fortunately, I managed to get to the chair without incident, and to be honest, the rest of it flew by.

Dominic West was also on the show, and full of the chats in the green room. He seems like a really lovely guy and had some Irish family with him who he wanted to ensure had a good experience that night. Alas, Brian O’Driscoll and I were like ships in the night so aside from a very quick ‘well done’ to each other we didn’t get to talk. To be honest, that’s probably a good thing because I don’t think I would have been able to be cool and probably would have droned on and on in a mortifying way about how great he is and how much I love his daughter’s name and then I would undoubtedly have made him feel uncomfortable as I described how much I love and admire his wife despite never having met her. The evening would almost certainly have ended with a restraining order and let’s be real, no one wants that.

I didn’t hang around after my interview because I was pretty wrecked (having had chemo the previous Tuesday) and also wanted to reward myself with a 5-in-1 XL.

Having devoured enough calories to feed a small city, I hit the sack. I was lucky to wake up and find that the feedback regarding my interview was really positive, so thank you very much if you contributed to it. People have been incredibly kind to me throughout this cancer bullshit (I was going to say journey, but come on, journey? No thanks) and I am truly grateful for it. Sometimes people ask me why I decided to be open and honest about everything that’s going on at the moment, and there are loads of reasons. The main reason that I’m glad that I made that decision at this point is the fact that I have heard from so many people who have experienced or are experiencing similar things to what I am now. You can’t put a price on other people’s support and wisdom.

That’s all for now – I’m going to try to be better about maintaining this website from now on. It was actually embarrassing there for a while. Talk soon. x