It has been almost two years since Home and Away alum Johnny Ruffo was diagnosed with a brain tumour.
The 31-year-old underwent a life-saving operation to remove a seven-centimetre brain tumour that had grown over his right frontal lobe, and underwent radiotherapy and chemotherapy to get rid of the remaining 5 per cent of the mass.
And now, six months after being told he was in remission, the young star has announced that he is ready to return to work.
Appearing on Channel 7’s The Morning Show, he said:
“I’m getting back into work… slowly keep kicking on.”
“Now that I have the all clear in the health part of things, I’m going to get back into television, back into acting, might even dip my toe into theatre – if the role is right,” he revealed.
While it is unlikely he’ll reprise the role of Chris Harrington in Summer Bay, he is getting back into the talent that made him famous on X Factor. Singing.
Johnny Ruffo reveals his plans to get back into acting post brain tumour.
(Image: Getty)On the show to promote his new single, Broken Glass, he revealed the song wasn’t just about his “experience with cancer”.
“This song is a ballad – the first I’ve ever done – and it’s about the support group around you and not being afraid to ask for help. When you’re down sometimes you need someone to pull you back up again, and it’s about that.
“Everyone goes through something that’s tough that they might feel is too hard for them to handle on their own,” he added.
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Johnny as Chris Harrington on Home and Away.
(Image: Channel Seven)Just months after link texthis diagnosis, the Aussie star sat down with The Project’s Carrie Bickmore to share his story, admitting it was down to luck that he was with us today.
“The surgeon said if I hadn’t gone to the hospital that night I would have died in my sleep that night. It is just sheer luck that I went in when I did and everything happened the way it did otherwise I wouldn’t be here,” he admitted.
The Perth native experienced headaches regularly – which he believed to be a side effect to his lifestyle.
“Anything that may have been a symptom, I just put down to normal life. Headaches – I played sports and copped a million and one knocks in the head,” he said,
“You never thought – it may have attributed to it or not. You wake up with a bit of a hangover and you think, ‘it is a headache from having a drink,’ but this particular time I hadn’t gone out at all and I just had a really bad headache. It grew from that.
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In an interview on the anniversary of his diagnosis, Johnny revealed that he was at home with his girlfriend, Tahnee Sims, and had a headache but didn’t think much of it.
“I’d had it for a good day before that, it had been ongoing and it just got worse and worse. It got to about 4 or 5 in the afternoon and I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t string a sentence together.”
Tahnee rushed Johnny to hospital and as he was vomiting at this stage, doctors decided to keep him overnight thinking it was a migraine. But when Tahnee received a call from the doctors the next morning, she was told that her boyfriend had fallen into a coma and needed emergency surgery to remove a brain tumour.
Johnny didn’t wake up until two days later with 27 staples in his head and no idea what had happened.
Johnny had 27 staples in his head after the operation that saved his life.
(Source: Instagram/Johnny Ruffo)“She’d brought me in on the Sunday. Next thing I know I wake up on Tuesday and they say, ‘You’ve had a brain tumour removed,'” the actor recalled. “When I finally came to I was like, ‘Holy s–t this is serious.'”
