Gabriel Clarke’s story has a peculiar symmetry to it. A man who spent thirty years filming other people’s hardships—boxers taking punishment in the last rounds, football players bearing the burden of expectations on aging knees—is now at the center of something he cannot control or alter. In 2021, Clarke was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, a condition that strips the body of its ability to move, speak, and eventually breathe, while leaving the mind entirely intact. It’s a specific kind of cruelty, and the consequences are not difficult to envision for someone whose entire career was based on communication. Clarke…
Author: Michael Martinez
Grant McOmie had blood clots and was admitted to the hospital. Doctors could quickly identify that part, at least. What they discovered next was not. A cancer that had apparently been growing without any notice to the outside world was hidden beneath the surface, unnoticed until those last few days. The most recognizable outdoor television voice in Oregon vanished in a matter of days rather than weeks. He was seventy-three. McOmie had been doing what most people only do on their best vacations for fifty years. In the same way that some people exchange business cards, he waded into rivers,…
Jeff Hordley’s daily attendance at Emmerdale, where he delivers some of the most emotionally charged scenes the show has produced in years while coping with a chronic illness that has no known cure and never fully goes away, is quietly remarkable. Cain Dingle is currently fighting prostate cancer on screen; new test results indicate the disease may have spread outside of the prostate, devastating him and Moira. It’s challenging, engrossing drama. The fact that the actor portraying those scenes has spent thirty years navigating his own medical reality off-camera is something that fewer people are aware of. In 1996, at…
It started as a sports injury, the kind that frequently affects athletes on the weekends. In January 2025, while playing padel tennis, Jon Boast, the spouse of A Place In The Sun host Jasmine Harman, suffered a severe fracture to his left leg that necessitated surgery. Padel, one of those sports that feels competitive enough to be taken seriously but social enough that you don’t always take the risks seriously, is currently very popular in Spain. Boast discovered his position on that line the hard way. It was a bad break. The footage was later shown to anyone who watched…
Only former pop stars are familiar with a certain kind of obscurity, the kind that comes with a quiet, purposeful decision to just walk away rather than with scandal or collapse. Long before it became popular to choose not to be famous, Andrew Ridgeley, the former half of Wham!, made that decision. Most people are unaware, however, that his retreat from public life was interspersed with a truly terrifying health crisis that not only changed his physical state but also perhaps gave his post-Wham! existence of a true sense of purpose. It took place in the middle of the 1990s,…
Most people have a mental image of Kevin Whately: the trustworthy Sergeant Lewis, who stood to the right of John Thaw’s gloomy Morse, patient and grounded as Oxford’s fictional murder rate rose to unbelievable heights. That picture is cozy and cozy, like a Sunday afternoon on television. However, there was something much more difficult and private going on behind it for years. Mary Whately’s mother was a grammar school teacher from Northumberland; she was intelligent, self-reliant, and seemed to enjoy weekend archaeological excavations. When she was given an Alzheimer’s diagnosis in the late 1990s, her son had to deal with…
The majority of Roger Cawley’s adult life has been spent in the background, which is noteworthy when your spouse is one of Australia’s most renowned athletes. Roger was the one who kept things going during the 1970s and 1980s while Evonne Goolagong Cawley was amassing Wimbledon titles and Grand Slam trophies. Roger was steady, practical, and well-organized. In a 2021 essay, their daughter Kelly succinctly described him: “Mum is the calm energy, while dad is an organizer, very businesslike.” Apparently, the majority of their married life has been characterized by this balance. It makes his present state of health seem…
There is a version of this story that sounds almost commonplace: a recovery ward, a surgeon, some pain, and a bad back. However, Storm Keating’s illness was never common. Not even near. What began as excruciating back pain that most people would have written off as stress or overwork quickly turned into something much more serious: a medical emergency that left her temporarily numb from the waist down and put her in danger of permanent paralysis. Cauda equina syndrome, a rare and serious spinal disorder brought on by compression of the nerve roots at the base of the spine, was…