Lorraine Kelly’s mother is about to undergo dialysis.

The 64-year-old presenter was very worried last July when her 81-year-old mother Anne was admitted to hospital after having been there in February 2023.

She suffers from nephrotic syndrome, which limits her kidney function, and Lorraine has now told “Your” magazine about her condition: “Maybe Mum will have to go on dialysis, even though she’s doing so well at the moment.

“I would like to go to meetings with her.”

Lorraine was also devastated last year when ITV digital producer Hannah Hawkins died of breast cancer aged 33 – and when Dame Deborah James passed away in June 2022 aged 40 after her battle with bowel cancer.

Speaking about how the losses made her reevaluate her life, she said, “Losing her made me want to take control of my life.

“We must find joy when we can.”

Lorraine is about to publish her first novel, The Island Swimmer, which she says is about a lonely woman named Evie who must confront secrets from her past and a traumatic childhood when she returns home and joins a group of cold-water swimmers on the Orkney Islands, off the northeast coast of Scotland.

She said: “The novelist Marian Keyes once told me that your characters can take you to unexpected places, and I wasn’t sure what she meant by that, but now I know that’s actually the case.”

Lorraine added that she was only able to complete the book thanks to the support of her husband, former cameraman Steve Smith, to whom she was married for 31 years.

She said: “I just don’t know what I would do without him, it would be like cutting off my arm.

“It is thanks to him that I found the time to write my novel. He takes a lot of the burden of everyday life off my shoulders and has taken even more on my shoulders in the last year.”