Some parts of this year’s royal story, and the horrible reality of both the Princess of Wales and King Charles’ battles with cancer, have finally been explained.
Vanity Fair’s Katie Nicholl has done some stellar reporting and finally provided some crucial answers to some of the strangest parts of a very strange royal year; and we are only in July.
On January 17, Kensington Palace shocked us all by announcing that Kate, the Princess of Wales, was in hospital for “planned abdominal surgery” and would be out for the count while she recovered.
Only hours later, Buckingham Palace issued a horribly similar statement about King Charles and his enlarged prostate, words no writer should ever have to type.
While Prince William was seen leaving the London Clinic during the two weeks that the princess spent as a patient, their three children, Prince George, Princess Charlotte, and Louis-of-the-front-page, were not seen once. No one knew why.
Reports now suggest that this was all done on purpose and that the princess “did not want her children to see her in a gown and hooked up to monitors and tubes.”
Instead, “she made do with video calls home every day.”
A friend of the family told Vanity Fair of that period: “Things were so normal at home that George was playing a rugby match against another school while Kate was hospitalised.”
It would be nice if this is where we could merrily end the story of Kate’s surgery drama, but fate had something much nastier in store for the mother-of-three.
The report gives new insight into how one of the most extraordinary scenes in royal history played out – and one that would leave the princess “floored.”
We now know that tests done after the surgery in January found cancer, a fact that would be kept under wraps for another two more months, during which time the Waleses suffered through what would have to be one of the hardest, if not the hardest, periods of their life together.
What 2024 has proven is that William and Kate, finding themselves in terrifying new waters, were all too fallible and all too imperfect.
