Vic Reeves: Inoperable brain tumour has made me deaf in one ear
Jim Moir, the comedian otherwise known as Vic Reeves, has been diagnosed with a benign brain tumour that has left him deaf in one ear.
Never again would he be able to listen to records in stereo, Moir said.
Moir, 62, has a vestibular schwannoma, a non-cancerous tumour that develops on the outside of the vestibulocochlear nerve that connects the brain to the ear and controls hearing.
He disclosed the news in a podcast, explaining that the tumour was inoperable.
“I’ve got what’s called a vestibular schwannoma. It’s a tumour in my head. I’ve gone completely deaf, one hundred per cent deaf, in my left ear. It will never come back,” he said.
“It’s the size of a grape. It’s benign. They can’t remove it. They can shrink it or just keep an eye on it, and that’s what they’re doing.
“I’d rather hear than not, but it’s happened so you just get on with it, don’t you? I’ve got used to it.”
The comedian, best known for the television series Shooting Stars and his partnership with Bob Mortimer, is also an artist who produces paintings of birds.
‘I had to throw away all my stereo LPs’
But he told the Adam Buxton podcast: “I like to go out birdwatching and I never know where the birds are. I can hear them but I don’t know what direction they are. If an aeroplane flies over, or a car approaches, I don’t know where it is.
“I had to throw away all my stereo LPs. It’s absolutely dead. Gone. I’m living with deafness. Can you imagine a life without stereo records? No more will I hear Jimi Hendrix doing If Six Was Nine. It goes all over the place.
“I thought it was great when stereo first happened - like we had a new toy and put it all over every record. All I’ve got left now is Frank Ifield on mono.”
Moir said that the tumour had damaged the nerve to the point where it had “gone ping and snapped. And you can’t re-attach nerves. Not at this stage in medical science, anyway. But in the future? Probably the week after I perish there will be great news.
“My dad died of prostate cancer. And about a year later he would have lived.”
Vestibular schwannomas are rare and account for around six in every 100 brain tumours, according to Cancer Research UK. The average age of diagnosis is 50.
