‘I healed a friend and started a spiritual journey'

Antonia Harman, 39, from north London, had a glamorous TV career, but helping her best friend set her on a path that’s seen her rescue others after trauma

- GILLIAN CRAWLEY

My best friend Lucie was totally unflappable. As a straight-talking flight attendant from Carlisle, she’d handled plenty of tricky situations at 30,000ft with charm and a smile.

But as we walked down a west London street to our favourite café one afternoon, Lucie confided something that was driving her insane. It was 2007 and for close to 12 months she had been having terrible ear infections which began after she burst her eardrum. She didn’t know how the original injury had happened, but her job, which involved repeatedly ascending and descending on flights, made it worse and she was often in agony.

Lucie was as tough as steel. We’d had great nights out together – she in her glamorous job for Virgin Atlantic and me working in TV presenting Sky entertainment shows. She’d recover from terrible hangovers without a whimper, so for her to complain about being in pain was shocking.

BEGGING FOR HELP

“One time I was in a hotel in New York in the middle of winter and the pain got so bad I went downstairs in my pyjamas and a coat and ran through the snow to a pharmacy and begged for help. It felt like childbirth through my ear,” she told me.

Every time the attacks struck, Lucie couldn’t work, so she often got stranded in cities thousands of miles away because she couldn’t fly home.

The NHS didn’t know what to do with her. She’d been told by her consultant that surgery to repair her eardrum was an option, but her injury was such an unknown entity the operation would have to be private at a cost of £4,500. He said the NHS wouldn’t want to invest the money because the op had a low success rate and the funds could be better spent on something with a proven outcome.