“Living with that uncertainty is pretty terrifying,” she continued.
She said she “did not want to live with the stress of thinking any minute, I could be taken out by something.”
A longtime advocate of women’s health, McCall was given given a special recognition award at the National Television Awards last year after having been awarded an MBE in 2023 for services to broadcasting.
Nowadays the host of the ITV dating show My Mum, Your Dad, McCall said she had to get her will in order following her diagnosis and even created a WhatsApp group to ensure her family would “all find a way through if I didn’t make it”.
She added: “I did go and address my will and make sure that was airtight. I talked to Michael about my wishes. I wrote letters of wishes to all the children and put those in my will.”
While the experience has “not changed me forever”, she noted: “But I’ve learned things about myself that I would never have learned without this operation.”
She thinks that in the near future she will view the experience as “one of the greatest blessings of my life”.
The star, who recently shocked viewers by appearing in a blonde wig on the Masked Singer, urged podcast listeners to “write your bucket list now”.