Former Eastenders Actress Blames Terminal Eye Cancer On Decades Of Sunbed Use

A former model and actress has called for a ban on sunbeds after she developed terminal eye cancer from 20 years of unprotected use.

The mum-of-one started using sunbeds when she was 14 and opted not to wear protective goggles so she didn’t have any tan lines.

She’s now calling on them to be banned so that at least ‘something good’ can come out of her death, as she leaves behind her husband Darren and seven-year-old daughter Sienna.

'I want something good to come out of my death. All this because I wanted to be brown. I would like sunbeds to be banned,’ said 42-year-old Debi Gibson from Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire.

'I am going to have to leave my daughter behind. She knows it all. She doesn't understand everything, she just knows that mummy is going to go to heaven soon, that mummy has a nasty disease called cancer and it is going to kill her.'

Debi – who has appeared on Eastenders and on-stage in Evita – had to have one of her eyes removed after being diagnosed with eye cancer in October 2012 and has been told the cancer is terminal after the disease spread to her liver.

She stopped using sunbeds in 2005 and after hearing horror stories of people dying of cancer – but it was too late after decades of using sunbeds.

In April 2012, she was told she had a choroidal melanoma, a very rare type of eye cancer that affects just one in six million people.

Chemotherapy failed to kill the cancer and a year later, surgerons removed her left eye.

It was in early 2014 that she was given the news that the cancer had spread to her liver and was now terminal.

'There is this pressure when you are modelling or in the acting profession to be the perfect colour. I saved up the money myself when I was 14 to buy a sunbed and had it at my parents' house,’ she said.

'I used it all the time, back then there weren't any guidelines around, people thought this was the safest way to tan.

'I eventually became a personal trainer at a gym and I used to use the sunbed there as well.

'They came with goggles, but those left you with ugly tan lines so I didn't use them, I never thought that would kill me.

'I moved to London when I was 18 to become an actress and a model. There was so much pressure to look tanned, I went through that with the film industry.

'Then around 2005, there was a lot of bad press around sunbeds, so I stopped using them.

'In 2012 I woke up and found everything was blurry, I went to my doctors and he sent me to the hospital.

'They did a scan and sat me down and told me that half of my eye was covered in a tumour.

‘It's rare, only around one in every six million people get it, the doctors said it is only seen in sunny countries and they only thing they could think caused it was my use of sunbeds without the protection.

'They tried chemo but eventually they told me it hadn't worked as they had hoped.

'I was already going blind at this point, so it felt easier when they told me they were going to take the eye out.

'It happened pretty quickly. They told me I needed the operation in the October, and it was removed in the November. It was a horrendous time.

'Then after about a year I went back for another scan and they told me it had spread to my liver and I was going to die.

'The doctor gave me eight weeks to live, which runs out next week.'

'At first I went mad, completely mad, I pulled my daughter straight out of school and we all went on holiday.

'But after a little while I came to terms with it. The doctors have me on a trial drug and are giving me chemo to shrink the tumour. That could give me months or years more time.'

Her husband Darren Gibson said that his wife ‘never seems scared’ but then again she is an actress.

'It has been horrendous. Nurses have been coming out to see her from the Douglas Macmillan Hospice and they have been fantastic,’ he said.

'Debi is an amazing woman. She never seems scared, I'm sure she's struggling inside sometimes, but she is an actress.'

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