
- One thing you can never call Kate Middleton (opens in new tab) is a drama queen. In fact, the Duchess of Cambridge has actually been known t0 downplay serious situations regarding her own health.
- When she was a student at Marlborough, Kate discovered a lump on her head that a doctor ordered her to get removed immediately with an emergency surgery.
- Royal expert and biographer Katie Nicholl (opens in new tab) wrote about the incident in her book Kate: The Future Queen.
Kate Middleton (opens in new tab) might be the future Queen of England, but she's not a drama queen. Is there an opposite of drama queen? Like, as in, someone who weirdly downplays objectively dramatic life events? Because Kate might actually be that instead.
Case in point: When Kate was in high school, she had a major health scare, followed by an emergency operation and throughout the whole ordeal was like, "Meh, NBD."
In her book Kate: The Future Queen (opens in new tab), royal expert and biographer Katie Nicholl (opens in new tab) relays the story, which is just terrifying. Apparently, during Kate's time at Marlborough, she discovered a lump on the left side of her head. The school called Kate's mom, who promptly took her to the doctor. That doctor ordered an emergency operation to remove the lump.
"I can remember the incident and her having an operation," Ann Patching, who worked at Marlborough for years, told Nicholl. "I don’t recall anything happening on the hockey pitch [field] that had anything to do with the lump. Catherine had the operation during her term time. She was back at school very soon afterwards. As usual, nothing was too much of a big deal for her. You could never accuse Catherine of being a drama queen, but Carole was very worried, as any mother would be."
The evidence of Kate's emergency (opens in new tab) operation is still around today, in the form of a scar on her hairline that you can still spot in pictures of the Duchess.
"Privately, she and William—who uncannily also bears a scar on his head from being struck by a golf club at age nine—are said to refer to their wounds as their 'Harry Potter scars,'" Nicholl wrote.
Just another thing Will and Kate (opens in new tab) have in common.
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Kayleigh Roberts is a freelance writer and editor with more than 10 years of professional experience. Her byline has appeared in Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, ELLE, Harper’s Bazaar, The Atlantic, Allure, Entertainment Weekly, MTV, Bustle, Refinery29, Girls’ Life Magazine, Just Jared, and Tiger Beat, among other publications. She's a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
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