EastEnders' Cheryl Fergison on her brutal addiction to self harm - 'it took years but I'm in a good place now'
29.04.2024 - 19:51
/ ok.co.uk
For anyone who has been through cancer the end of treatment is often a time to celebrate. But for former EastEnders favourite Cheryl Fergison it signalled only the start of a second nightmare involving years of self harm. Having been diagnosed with cancer of the womb in 2015 and subsequently undergoing a hysterectomy and five week course of radiotherapy she continued to wrongly believe that cancer cells remained in her body.
That psychological stress led her to start to start to hurt herself.
Despite reassurance that doctors would monitor her for years to come and indeed getting the five-year sign-off in 2020, Cheryl took matters into her own hands - with terrible results. “In my head, I thought I still had cancer cells in me. Doctors had talked about having done a ‘washing’ procedure as part of the surgery so I thought right, I’ll wash myself, I’ll wash these cells away,” recalled Cheryl, 58, who played Heather Trott for half a decade on the soap.
“So every day, sometimes twice a day, I would get a shower head and get the water at its hottest setting - as much as I could bear - and use it in the same area. “I was doing this for years. It became a routine, like an addiction.
I told nobody except Yass and he would try to stop me - he was so supportive - but it was in my head.” Burned and sore, smear tests became too painful to bear. Sex with her husband Yass was difficult and the tender skin would sometimes bleed. She now has a partial bladder prolapse, she believes as a result of her actions.
“I just thought: ‘this is what I have to do’. I’d try to wean myself off but I’d always do it again. You go through a threshold of pain - if I had to do fire eating for a living it wouldn’t be a problem,” explained Cheryl who now
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