LEARNING TO ADAPT: 'Life threw us a curve ball'

Having just relocated to rural Ireland, actor Ali Bastian reveals her world has been turned upside down by a shock cancer diagnosis

- DAWN EMERY

When former Hollyoaks star Ali Bastian and her husband David O'Mahony moved from London to rural Ireland with their two young daughters, they were excited about their new chapter. This spring, they swapped their London flat for a house in West Cork and were settling into their new home when, says Ali, "life threw us a major curve ball".

Ali, 42, reveals exclusively to OK! that she's been diagnosed with stage 2 breast cancer. She's in the midst of weekly chemotherapy treatments, which will last for around five months, and then she'll undergo a mastectomy and radiotherapy treatment. "It was a total shock," says Ali, who was diagnosed in the last week of June. "I have mornings when I wake up and I've forgotten... and then suddenly I remember.

I'm still trying to process it." The actor, who has also appeared in Doctors and performed on the seventh series of Strictly, first discovered a lump when she was breastfeeding her daughter Isabella, who is 19 months old. "I hadn't been breastfeeding Izzy at night but then David flew back to London for work and suddenly she was feeding like crazy. I was thinking, 'Maybe she's having a growth spurt or something.' And because of that, my boobs felt sore. The next morning I woke up and thought, 'Ouch, this really hurts.' And that's when I felt a lump.

"It was a bank holiday in Ireland so I went straight to the emergency doctor," says Ali, who also has a daughter, Isla, four, with David, 42. "It really seemed like I had mastitis, especially as I had been night-weaning Izzy before that. We thought I probably had a blocked duct.

The doctor gave me antibiotics and said that if it didn't clear up in a few days I should go to the breast clinic.