Roula Tells My Secret Battle With MS

The most talked about contestant reveals her debilitating disease.

- Amy Sinclair

She’s spent the last two weeks battling it out on our TV screens in a string of fiery clashes and feuds with fellow MKR contestants.

But behind the scenes, Roula can now reveal that she has been fighting her own secret war for the past 10 years – her devastating battle with multiple sclerosis (MS).

The 34-year-old says she was diagnosed with the disease – which attacks the body’s central nervous system, leading to paralysis in some cases – when she was just 23.

Since then, the illness has taken a very heavy toll on Roula, leading her to suffer from kidney failure, blindness in one eye, hair loss, depression and anxiety.

She currently has more than 90 lesions on her brain. Other MS episodes have seen her lose all feeling in her arm and one side of her face, as well as the use of her right leg twice, meaning she had to learn how to walk again.

The strain of the illness was so severe during her MKR  journey that she suffered from hypothermia and flare-ups with a hiatal hernia, a condition related to her MS that resulted in her having doctors visit her hotel room at night – a secret she kept from fellow MKR contestants.

‘I didn’t want to talk about it on the show. I didn’t go on the show to talk about MS... but it did affect me on the show,’ Roula says in an exclusive interview.

‘I got sick a few times, I had a doctor come visit me at the hotel. With MS you get very fatigued and I got hypothermia after the very first Instant Restaurant. My hiatal hernia was also the reason I couldn’t eat fried food in episode one – which I could never explain to the table. It was full-on.’