As a result of her “terrible” experience with chronic pain, broadcaster Kirsty Young took a four-year hiatus from hosting.

Due to fibromyalgia and rheumatoid arthritis, Young resigned from her role as host of Desert Island Discs in 2018.

She returned to the airways earlier this year, and for the Christmas Day episode of the BBC Radio 4 program, she served as the interviewee.

She remarked to Lauren Laverne, her successor, that persistent discomfort “grinds you away.”

“There are a lot of things that come along with losing your personality, sense of humor, and sense of self. It’s terrible.”

Fibromyalgia causes pain all over the body and can bring on severe fatigue, while rheumatoid arthritis causes pain, swelling and stiffness in the joints. The two long-term conditions are often linked.

Young, 54, said she got a diagnosis after about a year of trying to work out what was going on with her health, by which time she was “feeling really, really ropey”.

The journalist and former Crimewatch presenter eventually found a “brilliant professor of rheumatology” who told her she needed to reduce her workload.

She initially resisted, telling him: “That’s the kind of job I’ve got – I can’t do it part-time.”

And he responded, “Well, we can introduce all kinds of drugs, we can monitor you, but you have to lessen the stress in your life and you have to take this seriously. You can’t just keep downing painkillers down your throat, which are shocking and ineffective.

“It felt extremely genuine. Although it was spoken with the utmost love, it was simply a split second of crystal-clear reality. I recall stopping my car and having a good old cry over it. To borrow a Scottish expression, I had a good old greet.

She added: “I’m very aware in talking about this that people sit opposite physicians and get diagnoses that are much more serious than the one I got.

“But it’s a very painful thing and I was in pain and a chronic long-term pain condition is an absolute pain, literally and metaphorically, to deal with… and so I had to take it seriously if I was going to get better. So I did.”

She said she was now feeling “so much better”, and was well enough to co-present BBC coverage of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee this summer and then the monarch’s funeral in September.

Young was widely praised for her emotional closing remarks at the end of the funeral coverage.

“Today we have come together, many of us with tears in our eyes, but all of us with an everlasting warmth in our hearts for everything that she offered,” she said, encapsulating the feeling.

She recalled that afternoon as follows: “We are all in this moment – I am, you are, and we have all been in it, I thought while I was writing it. What was it about? Why did this situation develop the way it did? That is the gist of what I was saying.”

She also discussed her early life and career with Laverne, describing how she periodically encountered what she called “a nice little splash of snobbery and misogyny.”

“But that’s not unique to me,” she added. She recounted one occasion when she spoke to an English female film producer at the launch party for Channel 5 in 1997, who asked her if she was going to read the news “in that voice”.

“It’s the only one I have, though! That completely surprised me. She probably meant accent.”

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She also remembered running with former cabinet minister Michael Heseltine at the Conservative Party convention when the newly launched Channel 5 was attempting to “schmooze the politicians” into appearing on the station.

She stated that Michael Heseltine turned to face her and declared, “I’m not going to let some little smart alec in a skirt attempt to get the better of me.” I reasoned, “Right, so from now on, it’s going to be pants suits.”