Celeste Barber On Recovering From Open Heart Surgery At 25 Years Old
Ask any of her 5.3mil followers and they’ll tell you: Celeste Barber is the funniest woman on Instagram.
Quick, clever and downright hilarious, the comedian and actor pokes fun at the unrealistic portrayal of celebrities on social media and recreates their posts using her totally relatable life.
She's become so popular that Hollywood is, quite literally, knocking on her door - her book Challenge Accepted! is currently being optioned for a TV series. But this huge win has followed some seriously dark times.
In the March issue of InStyle Australia (of which she’s the cover star), the mum-of-two reveals that at the age of 25, a procedure to fix a hole in her heart turned into emergency open heart surgery.
“At the risk of sounding too dramatic, I nearly died – it was f ***ing ridiculous,” she said.
“And the recovery was like nothing else – they had literally pulled at my heartstrings. The idea that my heart had been cut open… really got to me.
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Just months later, her best friend and former All Saints co-star, Mike Priestley, took his own life. The tragic news made an already tough period of healing impossibly bleak.
“I remember that time in recovery, feeling heartbroken and [being] literally heartbroken, [as] a big, dark, couple of years.”
The salve for her grief? Comedy. “It’s a coping mechanism,” she explained. “I say something funny and inappropriate just to make that awkwardness go away.”
For more on Celeste, pick up a copy of the March issue of InStyle magazine, on sale now.
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