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Home and Away’s Johnny Ruffo opens up about his brain cancer on the anniversary of his diagnosis

The former Home and Away star was "hours from death".
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Home and Away’s Johnny Ruffo was “hours from death”, he’s dramatically revealed on the one-year anniversary of his diagnosis with with brain cancer.

The 30 year-old actor told Who magazine’s podcast Who Are You that he was in hospital with a migraine when a fist-sized tumour was found in his brain.

“The doctor said ‘If you didn’t come in [to the hospital], you would have gone to sleep and you would have been dead,” Johnny has revealed.

Johnny’s girlfriend Tahnee Sims, rushed him to hospital.

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.

“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.'”

Johnny still has five more months of chemotherapy to go but hinted to Kyle and Jackie O on their breakfast radio show that his character, Chris Harrington, could be returning to Summer Bay.

“Maybe he will come back. It’s always good to leave it open. You never know.”

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