Rita Simons - ‘I tackled years of anxiety when I started HRT - it’s been brilliant’
17.06.2024 - 20:47
/ ok.co.uk
Soap star Rita Simons, who is six months into her role as Marie Fielding in Hollyoaks, opens up to OK! exclusively about life after EastEnders, working away from her family and her years-long battle with anxiety, which she has finally managed to get a lid on. The star has been with her partner Ben Harlow since 2021, following her divorce from her husband of 14 years Theo Silveston – with whom she shares twins Jaimee and Maiya. And here, she tells OK! how she is feeling twelve months after undergoing major surgery.
Explaining that she had suffered from ‘years of anxiety’ before her hysterectomy last year, Rita said: “In all my adult life since I’ve had kids I have had this anxiety – obviously triggered by hormones. I tried everything. My anxiety is the best it has ever been.
Without a shadow of a doubt.” She continued: “I was an anxious kid, but when I had the babies, I started having panic attacks, which I’d never had in my life.
They came out of nowhere. It took me 17 years to clock and go, “it’s my hormones”. I was thinking of childhood trauma, this and that, but it was hormones.
I was getting to five days [into the menstrual cycle] and that was all I had all month.” Nowadays. However, it seems the soap queen - who previously opened up about her 'breakdown' after her marriage split - is a new woman, and loving life thanks to HRT treatment. “ I have six-monthly hormones literally in my bum cheek, into the skin.
Deep down into the fat. So my energy is back up, it’s an accumulative effect. My mum had a hysterectomy at 38 and had the pellets.
She is 70 and looks incredible. “She hasn’t aged at all because she’s been on these hormones. So I thought, if I ever end up having a hysterectomy, which I did, I would take the same
.