Johnny Ruffo My Brain Cancer Battle

The Former Home And Away Favourite Opens Up The Fight Of His Life

- Jenny Brown

The pain was intense, excruciating. With unbearable pressure building inside his brain, Johnny Ruffo felt as if someone was holding a blowtorch to his head.

He wanted to be sick. He couldn’t lie still, but thrashed around his bed in the emergency ward at Sydney’s Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. Finally, he drifted into an uneasy sleep, then woke up and vomited before slipping into a coma.

The X Factor’s happy-go-lucky favourite went to casualty thinking he had a migraine, but CT and MRI scans revealed the terrifying truth. There was a 7cm tumour in the right frontal lobe of his brain – it turned out to be cancerous – and Johnny would die unless he had emergency surgery to remove it.

With his mother in faraway Bunbury, WA, there was only one person who could give permission for the operation to go ahead - the former Home And Away star’s 23-year-old girlfriend, Tahnee Sims.

‘Doctors told her there was a one in 20 chance I could die from the surgery. Tahnee had to sign the form, knowing that,’ marvels Johnny, who agreed to share his full story with New Idea. ‘But without the operation, there was a 100 per cent certainty I would have died because of the pressure on my brain. So I guess she didn’t really have much of a choice!’

After nine hours the singer, actor and dancer emerged from theatre on Monday, August 7, with 27 staples in his head and 95 per cent of the tumour gone. ‘The other five per cent was too close to nerve endings to get it out,’ he explains. ‘If they had tried and something went wrong, it could potentially have caused paralysis all down the left side of my body.’