Natasha Hamilton reveals secret cancer battle in emotional GMB chat

The former Atomic Kitten singer, 42, gave fans a health update as she spoke about her diagnosis with hosts Kate Garraway , 58, and Robert Rinder, 47.

Transcript

00:00What happened? How did you discover the mole?

00:03So I'd been on holiday and I wasn't actually in the sun a lot

00:07because my baby was only about five months old and I was breastfeeding.

00:11And one afternoon I had her on my lap and my back was in the sun and I burnt.

00:17And I don't know whether it was later that day or the next day,

00:21I had like an itchy spot on my back and I just thought it was a mosquito bite.

00:26Didn't think nothing of it.

00:27You don't get to look at your back very often, do you?

00:29It's tucked away.

00:30I felt it. I went, oh, mosquito bite.

00:33It wasn't until maybe four weeks later when I was at home and it was itching

00:37and I was like, hang on a minute, that seems a bit long for a mosquito bite.

00:42Asked my husband to have a look and he went, oh, that's not a bite.

00:46And he took the picture and when I looked at it, I went, OK, I think I know what that is.

00:50And originally it had just been a dark freckle that I'd had on my back for many years.

00:55There wasn't even, it wasn't raised, it wasn't a mole, it was just a freckle.

01:00You, when you were in Atomic Kitten and when you were younger, you look very young now,

01:05but when you were much younger, of course, in Atomic Kitten, there you are.

01:09I mean, look at that.

01:10That was the era where everybody wanted to look very, very, very brown and you have naturally pale skin.

01:16So were you using tan beds a lot back in the day?

01:20So, I mean, people of my age will probably feel the same or remember if you were going on a night out,

01:27you used a sunbed because you wanted that sun-kissed look to make yourself feel good and give you a bit of confidence.

01:32If I was going to do something like Top of the Pops or a big TV show, I'd want to look sun-kissed.

01:37So we would go to the sunbeds.

01:39There was a sunbed shop face in the hotel that we stayed in all the time in London and I'd used tan accelerators.

01:46And I can honestly say I don't think there was ever a time when I went on a sunbed that I didn't burn, looking back now.

01:52Because I'm type 1 skin anyway.

01:54I'm not supposed to be in such intense sun.

01:57Am I right that your mum, Maria, had the same cancer and she was the one that said,

02:02look, go and get this sorted at ASAP?

02:05So two years previous, my mum had been suffering with a, it was just a patch of dry skin that wouldn't heal.

02:12So it wasn't anything ominous looking.

02:15It was just this piece of skin.

02:17And I said to her, look, go and see a dermatologist because I'd done a lot of research about this previous.

02:22And initially she was told it was nothing and was sent away.

02:27And it was, that was at the doctor's.

02:28It was maybe a year later when I saw it and it looked quite sore and aggravated.

02:34I said, mum, please ask them to refer you to a dermatologist, which they did.

02:38And straight away they said, look, it is skin cancer.

02:41She had a lot of cancerous cells burnt on the face, which I know was very painful for her.

02:46And then she had the basal cell carcinoma removed, which you can see now.