This week, Traitors viewers will be introduced to contestant Olivia Dean, who has defied all odds after undergoing an incredibly difficult health battle throughout her childhood and teen years

It’s crunch time for 25 new new hopefuls vying to outwit each other and smoke out the Traitors to bag the cash prize. Or, in the case of the traitors, murder all the other players and scheme their way to the final.

This week, viewers will be introduced to one contestant who has defied all odds after undergoing an incredibly difficult health battle throughout her childhood and teen years. Beautician and model Olivia (Livi) Dean, 26, was persuaded to take part by her mum, who’s a huge fan of the show.

“I thought I’ll just apply for it, but I didn’t take it too seriously until I got a bit further in the process,” she admits ahead of the show airing for the first time this evening. “I used to think I’d be amazing as a Traitor, but I’ve thought about it and I’m actually an honest person. I think if I lie, nothing good will happen for me, so I always avoid lying. I do really want to be a Faithful and I think I’d be a good Faithful.”

Liv was just 12 when she went to the opticians with her sister and mum to get sunglasses and have her eyes checked. “My vision was funny, I said, so maybe I needed glasses too,” she told the Telegraph. “Ironically, there was a problem with my eyes, though I’d never clocked that things weren’t totally normal. For as long as I could remember there was this big black ‘floater’ in my vision in my right eye. Because it had always been there, I’d thought that other people must have one as well.”

Olivia Dean was diagnosed with cancer at 12 ( 
Image:
livi.deane/Instagram)

However, when the optician saw the mass in her eye, he told her she needed to go to the hospital to have it checked. He’d believed it was cataracts but considering how young she was, it was also suspicious.

She was referred to St Bart’s – a specialist hospital for heart and cancer care – in London after her local hospital in Horsham struggled to diagnose her condition. Sadly, she was told she had a form of cancer called retinoblastoma in her right eye.

Livi was transferred to Great Ormond Street Hospital to start chemotherapy straight away. She recalled her mum and nanna bursting into tears as she stared in shock and asked if she was going to die. Livi was told that the worst case scenario would be that she would lose her eye, but that they would try to stop that from happening.

“To this day I’m the oldest person ever to be diagnosed with retinoblastoma in Britain, a form of cancer that’s usually found in children under four – so in reality, no one knew what was going to happen,” she said. “Specsavers saved my life, I know now. Had I not gone for that checkup I would have died.”

Livi underwent chemotherapy for three weeks but said that the “worst thing” was losing her hair. She said: “I knew it was going to happen. It came out of my short brown bob in clumps, when I brushed or washed it. The kids at school were horrible, calling me a boy and making fun of my bald patches. I was gifted a beautiful wig from the Little Princess Trust that saved my self-esteem, and that my mum could never have afforded herself.

She lost hair from all over her body, including her legs, eyebrows, eyelashes and armpits. She recalled her period stopped just a few months after they had started – prior to the diagnosis and treatment – and that she felt like she’d been “held back in childhood”.

She has a prosthetic eye but feels more beautiful without it ( 
Image:
livi.deane/Instagram)

Livi is now a model and beautician ( 
Image:
Getty Images)
Tragically, none of the treatments fully worked so, in a last ditch attempt to save her eye, they became the eleventh person in the world to be offered chemotherapy intravenously through a transfusion into her groin while under general anaesthetic. Thast was able to freeze her tumour and she was in remission.

But, sadly, she was told just before Christmas that her cancer was growing again and that they would have to remove her eye. “I was going to be disfigured, I thought, with a horrible, scary crater in my face,” she said. “What would kids at school think? Later they would call me a cyclops, so I was right about what was coming.”

She underwent the surgery on December 30 and recalled “howling” when she woke up after the removal, admitting it hurt to move her remaining eye around. “The first thing my mum said when I woke up was that I looked beautiful. She was my guiding light through all of this,” she said.

Sadly, her cancer didn’t fully go away despite her eye being removed and she needed another round of chemo for it to go fully into remission. Describing it as a “miracle” she survived, Livi admitted that she was “so resigned to dying that the hospital almost had to call social services to force [her] to come in for treatment”.

Livi went on to have a prosthetic eye designed for her at Moorfields Eye hospital, but says that if she has it in today people think she has a “lazy eye”. She also doesn’t feel like the “real her” when she puts it in and feels more beautiful without it.

Three years ago, while working as a cleaner for her sister’s company, she posted about her eye loss story and shared a photo of herself without her prosthetic. It was from this post she was discovered by Katie Piper, who helped get her signed to a modelling agency. Since then, she’sappeared in Vogue magazine without her prosthetic.

Livi said: “I never got to be a normal teenager, but my illness taught me that there is more to life than the little inconveniences and dramas we all get so wrapped up in.”