Everyone has been so kind.. I'm glad I shared it

TV star on Alzheimer's news

- ALISON PHILLIPS

TV favourite Fiona Phillips has just two important words to say to the public: “Thank you.” 

Thank you for the outpouring of love and support since she revealed in Wednesday’s Mirror she has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

Thank you to all the ordinary people who have stopped her in the street to say: “Good luck, we’re rooting for you.”

Thank you to all the celebrities, politicians and sports stars she came to know during more than a decade on the breakfast TV sofa, for sharing their love and concern.

And above all, thank you to those scientists and medics running the revolutionary trials she is on at University College Hospital , London, to find a drug which will stall or even reverse the disease.

Fiona, 62, says: “People have been so kind to me. Because I was worried about sharing the news I have this awful disease. I was anxious people would be staring or whispering about me or would just write me off as a batty old woman.

DELIGHTED

But there has been incredible kindness. And so many people have told me about how Alzheimer’s has hit their families, as it has attacked mine, and somehow it just makes them feel a little bit less alone.”

Together we read through some of the messages Fiona – married to ITV This Morning editor Martin Frizell – has received.

One is from a Mirror reader who bumped into her at a TV studio when he was a bodyguard for Wayne Rooney. Steve Mercer writes: “She was lovely and bubbly. I still smile when I remember that very brief meeting. I am at the same stage of Alzheimer’s as she is now.”