Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson’s youngest daughter, Princess Eugenie, has given a rare interview about the health battle she dealt with growing up that changed her life.

During a visit to Horatio’s Garden at Salisbury Hospital, the royal spoke to The Telegraph about being diagnosed with scoliosis in 2002 when she was 12 years old.

“The incapacity that comes with a spinal injury — it’s so hard to come to grips with it,” Eugenie explained. “I had a corner room in the hospital with two windows looking out over a car park. I was too young to notice I couldn’t get outside … I couldn’t get out of bed or do anything for myself. I felt very embarrassed about the whole thing. I don’t know why or where it came from.”

She ended up getting surgery which required eight-inch titanium rods inserted into each side of her spine and one-and-a-half screws at the top of her neck.

The princess also talked about how her mother, the Duchess of York, changed her thinking about the condition, saying, “She was amazing. She’d ask me if she could show it to people, then she’d turn me around and say, ‘My daughter is superhuman, you’ve got to check out her scar.’ It trained my brain that it’s OK, scars are cool. It became a positive memory, a part of me, that I could do something with in the future. I could help heal other people.”

When Eugenie married her husband, Jack Brooksbank, in 2018, she chose a low-back wedding gown that showed off her scar. The princess said it was important to pick a dress that didn’t hide the scar because she wanted to show the world how much she values having gotten that life-changing surgery.