Loose Women star Coleen Nolan didn’t tell her sister Maureen of her cancer diagnosis before she revealed the news during an appearance on the ITV daytime show last month
When Maureen Nolan discovered that her younger sister, Coleen, had become the latest member of her family to be blighted by cancer, she was utterly shell-shocked.
She and her sisters have been living in cancer’s shadow for nearly 20 years, yet Maureen, 69, only learned of Coleen’s carcinoma diagnosis last month, after the star opened up about her ordeal on Loose Women. “I didn’t see her announce the news on the show, so suddenly I’m getting all these messages saying, âSorry to hear the news about Coleen’,” says the singer. “I was so shocked â I immediately phoned her and asked what had happened. I think she now regrets sharing the news on Loose Women.”
Coleen, 58, later explained she hadn’t wanted to tell her sisters about her diagnosis because it seemed like “nothing” compared to what some of them have been through. But it was in fact Maureen who first raised the alarm about a worrying “bit of skin” on her youngest sister’s neck months earlier.
“I remember seeing the mark on her neck some time ago and I told her to have it checked, which eventually she did,” she recalls. “Then they found this mark on her face, which I believe is the start of melanoma, which is the worst kind of skin cancer.