Olympic cycling legend Sir Chris Hoy has opened up about the heartbreaking moment his wife Sarra told him of her MS diagnosis just weeks after learning he had terminal cancer.
Sarra was told by doctors that she had an ‘aggressive’ form of multiple sclerosis, a degenerative disease for which there is no cure, after feeling a tingling sensation in her face and tongue.
It came around the same time Hoy – a six-time Olympic champion and the second most decorated Olympic cyclist of all time – had been given between two and four years to live, after his prostate cancer spread to his bones and became terminal.
In his upcoming book, an autobiography called All That Matters, Hoy describes the moment he learned that Sarra had MS.
‘One evening in December, after our kids Callum and Chloe had gone to bed, Sarra looked serious and said she had something to tell me,’ Hoy wrote.
‘I realised immediately it was something big as Sarra, always so strong in every situation, was beginning to crumble and struggling to get the words out. “Do you remember that scan I went for?” she started through tear-filled eyes. “Well, they think it might be multiple sclerosis.”
‘I immediately broke down, distraught both by the news and the fact she’d received it without me there.
‘She went on to explain they had called her and told her over a month before. It was so hard to try to compute that she had absorbed the awfulness of this diagnosis alone, without sharing it with me, in order to protect me.
‘I tried to let the words sink in as my mind was spinning, trying to understand what had been happening to her, all while she had been accompanying me to every one of my own hospital appointments.
‘As with my diagnosis, she was the one to bring me back to the present, trying to reassure me, saying: “Look at me, I’m fine right now, I’m here, I’m OK.”
Sarra Hoy recently said the couple – who got married in Edinburgh 14 years ago and have two children – had ‘so many more adventures planned’.
‘Completely overwhelmed by your kind, thoughtful and helpful messages,’ she wrote on Instagram. ‘Many people say they don’t know what to say – that’s OK, you don’t need to have the words – just taking the time to message has been like a soothing balm to the soul. Thank you.
‘I’ve been told that men seeking advice about prostate cancer is up sevenfold and that Chris’s story is likely to save countless lives. This takes my breath away. Life is wonderful. We are excited about the future. We have so many more adventures planned … And I am so fortunate to get to do it all with @chrishoy1.’