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No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. He was rushed to a specialist hospital and also got diagnosed with a rare, but it's such an aggressive form of blood cancer called acute mild leukemia.

From the Tuesday when she was diagnosed, she'd gone by the Friday. What alcohol does is it basically spends it for a while.

Yeah.

But the problem is when you're already in a dark place, what it does, it like takes you to

the top of this horrible slide and releases you for a bit and then drops you.

And you descend to an even darker place than you were before you picked up the bottle

and started drinking.

Samma Thomas, thank you so much for coming on, mate.

I really, really appreciate you for coming on.

So it's not quite bleak, but I saw on Instagram you lost a really close friend to press cancer recently.

Yeah, about a month and a half ago.

I was so sorry to hear about that, mate. How are you doing? Yeah, I'm all right. It's just so sad and it was so quick. And Becca was 46. She was a housemate of mine when I was on Blue Peter, lived in Battersea. And you lived together? Yeah, yeah, but me and a couple of others. So I've known it for years. And it just was really quick.

She got through breast cancer last year, and she's got a four-year-old daughter, a lovely husband called Andy. And then it came back. I saw her in November at a friend's party. She looked so good and healthy. And then she just said to me on the choir, then I found a lump in my neck. It's going to get checked out next week

And four weeks later she's gone

Oh my God

It's like horrendous so it's yeah it's been

really hard but most of all it's because you see and you know because of my experience you know

exactly what her husband and he's going through and obviously i've been able to help him

without sannie arrogant in ways that a lot of other friends can't because they don't have any to fall back on in knowing what this is like to go through. Absolutely. But having a kid as well, which is a very similar situation to what I had eight years ago. I'm kind of able to support him from afar because he lives about three hours away. But yeah, just really sad and just feels like there's a lot of young people losing the lives to cancer at the moment so yeah it's

tough but it must be it must be great for him to for her husband to have you to chat to

well it's the most important thing mate if you go through loss and we all do at some stage in life

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