I couldn’t stand upright and felt like head was collapsing inwards – docs thought I had a brain tumour, says Dawn French
DAWN French’s doctors feared she had a brain tumour as she battled vertigo during her last tour.
The comic has told of the terrifying toll which the condition had on her, which left her scared she would fall over on stage because she couldn’t tell “which way is upright.”
She was diagnosed with it during her 30 Million Minutes tour in 2014 and said that at its worst, it felt like her head was “collapsing inwards.”
The Vicar of Dibley star then had to take a stick on stage to help her stand up without falling over.
Dawn said: “It is like my skull is a room and the whole of the top is collapsing inwards, and everything starts spinning.
“It’s like being very drunk and not understanding what is up and what is down.
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“For a while they thought I might have a brain tumour.
“I went and had all kinds of investigations and in the end a very clever neurologist told me, ‘No, this is triggered by all the light which is side-lit on the stage.
“‘Your brain cannot take all of this light because you’ve got that coming into the side of your eyes but you’ve got blackness right in front of you where the audience are. You’ve got nothing to latch your eyes to.’”
She was performing on a raked stage, meaning it sloped towards the audience, which made things even worse.
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Dawn explained: “The stage is raked so my body is having all of these weird signals that you’re not upright.
“I took a stick on stage with me and I would make my two legs very wide on stage and I would put the stick in front of me like a tripod so that I had something to stand up to.
“It was like being on a buffeting boat or something. It was awful.”
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The French & Saunders star is now nervous about the prospect of her vertigo returning when she returns to stand-up in September on her Dawn French Is A Huge T**t tour.
Speaking on Michelle Visage’s Rule Breakers podcast, she added: “Three weeks to the day that I finished that show, it just went. So I have a slight fear that that might come back.
“So when you ask me if I have nerves, I have good nerves about the show, I have not so good nerves about that kicking off again.
“If it kicks off I know that I’m in hell, holding onto walls.
“I used to say to my crew, ‘you have to stand there’ - because there’s no curtain - ‘if I fall over, you just drag me off. I won’t be dying, but I will fall over because I don’t know which is upright. I don’t know how to stand still’.”
