Andy Lee has revealed his mum was given two weeks to live in 1996, yet she is still alive and thriving today
After thinking he would lose his mum to a rare illness 24 years ago, Andy Lee says his family is closer than ever as his mum continues to make progress.
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Andy Lee has opened up about his mother’s devastating illness, revealing she was told she had two weeks to live in 1996.
The comedian said he was 15 when his mum Margaret suffered from rare condition cerebral vasculitis and was given the grim diagnosis.
He opened up in Podcast One’s A Life of Greatness with Sarah Grynberg.
“It’s not something I talk about very often. Mum got sick, but she’s also still with us, so we’re really, really lucky,’’ Lee said.
“She got given two weeks to live in 96 and then again they thought she was going to pass a couple of years later... it all becomes a bit blurry. We kind of stopped believing doctor’s opinions for a while there. I still love doctors, I love our medical industry. The hospital and healthcare system in Australia is just incredible.
“It was not a knock on that, it was more just you didn’t have to take what anyone was saying on face value because it was all really new.
“From what I can gather mum was the first to survive this disease. It was called cerebral vasculitis. Cerebral being the brain and vasculitis in your vein system.
“Where essentially it’s like having strokes, but strokes happen in the artery and normally stop your whole body. This was strokes in the vein so little clots and it shut off a lot of her brain, or part of her brain. So she forgot how to walk, talk, who we all were.”
Lee said he and his sister, Alex and brother, Cam, had to reintroduce themselves to her while she was in hospital for six months.
“I was 15 so it’s a strange thing to have to go in each day and introduce yourself to your mum, and say ‘I’m Andy, I play the trumpet, I like playing hockey’ and have that groundhog day conversation,’’ he said.
“But as far as coping I used to laugh a lot which I know is weird and I’d make jokes about it. “My coping mechanism is generally making jokes about a situation even it’s dark humour. “That’s probably why my family is super close now. If there’s any silver lining for mum being sick it’s the fact that you really treasure not just her, but the overall family dynamic and the relationship. We spend a lot of time together all five of us and now the growing families around that.”
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Lee said his mum was doing well and was happy to chat to anyone about her experiences.
“The very few times I have talked about it over the last 20 years, there has been a handful of people who have reached out, scared and have survived,’’ he said.
“She can walk again, she can talk, she snapped out of it. She doesn’t remember a lot of that year, the brain is strange in that way but she’s got an amazing memory for things before that. “They’ve only just had tests recently that showed the black spot in her brain that had lost all the connective tissue, I don’t know the official term for it, it’s redirected things around it.
“It’s not necessarily healing that part but it’s managed to reroute certain signals. So the brain is still working out how to deal with it many years later.”