EMMA'S bouncing back

As she recovers from heart surgery, the presenter is refreshingly honest about her health scare

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For someone as confident and outgoing as Emma Willis, it was quite a shock earlier this year when she found herself needing heart surgery at just 48, and despite living a healthy and active lifestyle. In January, doctors discovered she'd been suffering with an undiagnosed hole in her heart her entire life - and she had to undergo a keyhole operation to plug it. 'It's a bit of a head scramble,' she reveals, 'when you find out something like that, that you've had something there your whole life, and you had no idea about it.'

Now 49, Love is Blind host Emma had always suffered heart palpitations, yet dismissed them as stress-related, until they began increasing in frequency. 'I'm a brilliant overthinker, and my mind will go in every possible direction and scenario, so going into something like surgery, I really got myself at it, I get really anxious and nervous,' she says.

But for Emma, the recovery wasn't simply physical. 'It's been much more of a psychological adjustment,' she admits, 'because you don't have a wound that you can see. The healing is all internal, and you can't feel it.'

New mentality

It's only been in the last five years that the former