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Actress Olivia Williams Reportedly Told Doctors for 4 Years Something Was Wrong Before Finally Receiving Cancer Diagnosis

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Doctors are under constant pressure to get things right. Human lives depend on it.

And it’s not that doctors who misdiagnose patients simply don’t care (though perhaps that’s true in some cases), it’s just that situations and symptoms are so variable and there are so many obscure conditions out there that diagnosing exactly what someone is experiencing requires a high level of skill and a familiar disease.

Actress Olivia Williams knows all too well what that’s like, and while she wrote in a December article for British Vogue that she “doesn’t blame the doctors” for not diagnosing her cancer earlier, she knew something was wrong for years before they told her what she already knew: She was sick.

Williams — known for her roles in “The Sixth Sense” and TV show “The Halcyon” — has been speaking about her experience, penning her own accounts so that people can hear from her, in her own words, what she went through.



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“My rocky road to diagnosis had started in October 2014,” she wrote for The Daily Mail. “After a long summer filming the TV series Manhattan in New Mexico, I caught up with old friends and we laid into some fizz. The next morning, my hands were red and so swollen my wedding ring didn’t fit. My joints ached and my stomach was upset.”

“My GP referred me to an eccentric rheumatologist on Harley Street. Definitely lupus, he declared. But, after a year of medication and close scrutiny, I was discharged with a note that said I definitely did not have lupus – maybe my symptoms were stress-related? Imaginary? perimenopausal?”

Her symptoms were a bit ambiguous, as they could be linked to many different conditions and none seemed particularly illuminating.

“Mine were deemed the natural state of any woman in her mid-40s, since being perimenopausal seems to account for everything, from acne to homicide,” she wrote.

“Many of the tests required fasting when I was already starving, then swallowing pints of luminous concoctions or blowing into a bag that measured your stomach bacteria. I was losing weight so fast that my costume had to be refitted every week, then every day.”



But after several doctors and plenty of tests, she finally got some sort of concrete news. She finally had some proof for what she’d been experiencing, but it could prove to be deadly.

“Finally, a CT scan showed a mass taking up half my pancreas,” she continued. “I assumed it was adenocarcinoma and that I was done.”

The way to determine the severity of her case involved a biopsy, so she went in for one. The doctor performing the biopsy commented that he knew she was an actress, but that he didn’t recognize her.

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“I don’t usually mind not being especially famous, but in this hospital, it seemed to be a problem,” Williams wrote. “If I were famous, perhaps he’d be a bit more sympathetic about the gruelling four-year search that had brought me to this Holy Grail of Diagnosis.”

“A week later, the same professor of endoscopy revealed the results in an equally abrupt email: ‘Its malignant, neuroendocrine tumour/cancer. Thank you.’”

Despite the fact that she’d still been diagnosed with cancer, it was not adenocarcinoma, it was VIPoma — which was operable and had a much higher survival rate. She struggled to wrap up her sections in the film she was currently part of before flying into London for surgery at King’s College.

“It’s been 18 months since half my pancreas, spleen, gallbladder and a big chunk of my liver were removed, and I feel great,” she wrote. “An astounding laparoscopic surgeon at King’s has left a scattering of small incisions across my body.”



After recovering from her ordeal, she was contacted by Pancreatic Cancer U.K. to become an ambassador. At first she balked at the suggestion, but she came around to it in the end.

“At first I was hesitant to become an ambassador because I didn’t feel I had enough fame or clout to be of much use,” she wrote. “When Pancreatic Cancer U.K. came back and explained that I hadn’t been asked because I was famous, but because there are so few survivors, I realised the extremity of the situation.”

“Early diagnosis could have saved the lives of so many people – among them my friend Tom Beard, my acting hero Alan Rickman and The Queen of Soul Aretha Franklin.

“By the time any of these beloved people were symptomatic, too much damage had been done by cancer. Please help me make difference to the shocking survival statistics for anyone diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.”

According to Pancreatic Cancer U.K., a team is working on developing “the first-ever simple diagnostic test for the disease by 2024.” Hopefully they will be successful in their efforts and pancreatic cancer will become much more detectable and treatable early on.

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