In 1990, Triona Holden was filming in Eritrea during the Ethiopian Civil War when a man grabbed her and started pulling her along.

“This is it, I’m going to die,” she thought to herself while she frantically looked for her cameraman and sound recordist for help.

The man threw the terrified BBC correspondent against the side of a building and motioned her to stay where she was.

Hovering above was a Russian fighter plane. Triona says the very same aircraft had dropped a bomb which killed a Dutch journalist just a few weeks before.

Despite her initial terror, it turned out this man - from the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front - was in fact trying to save Triona’s life.

“Things like that can come at you from nowhere,” the 60-year-old tells me at her home in Whitstable where she has lived for nine years. “I think I have been lucky a lot.”

Triona - who started her career at the Sheffield Star aged 17 before moving to the BBC - had been in other life-threatening situations. She was caught under fire from scud missiles in the Gulf War, walked through minefields in Northern Iraq and got mugged in the Brixton riots.

But it was a battle with her own body when she was 39 which nearly killed her - twice - ending her mighty BBC career and destroying her three-year marriage.

She was filming a piece-to-camera in a Sainsbury’s when she felt a horrific pain - like a knife was stabbing her eye.

The previous week, while recording in Romanian orphanages, she noticed she was unwell but ignored it and carried on.

After 20 attempts of trying to film in the supermarket, she was finally taken to A&E.

The doctors thought she could have a possible brain tumour - but it was revealed to be a rare and painful condition called posterior scleritis - where the eyes become inflamed inside the socket.

About a year later, Triona received more life-changing news. She was diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosis, known as lupus, where the body’s immune system attacks your own tissues and organs.

“From that moment on, things in my life began to change,” she says. “It was really hard - all I had worked for, I started to lose.

“I couldn’t pick up my young kids because my body had become so inflamed.

“I am still grieving through it now and it was 20 years ago.”

Despite the BBC being “brilliant” to Triona and her trying to carry on, she was retired on medical grounds aged 39.

But this sparked a moment of change for her and she began to reinvent herself.

She says: “When I was on TV, you had to look the same. If you wore a different eye-shadow, people would write in to complain. I took all my news-reading clothes to the charity shop.

“I had my hair cut, dyed it red and it really worked for me - it gave me a new identity.”

Although having never painted before, nurses told her she had a real talent when she picked up a brush with her daughters when they visited her in hospital.

After her previous marriage breaking down following her diagnosis, Triona met Ian Palmer, a professor of military psychiatry and a former SAS doctor, at her friend and former colleague Kate Adie’s book launch. They married in 2004.

Ian supported her passion for art and has discovered a love for it himself.

Triona got a degree in 2010 at the Chelsea College of Fine Art and Design and opened her own art gallery - The Flying Pig Studio - at 21 Canterbury Road in Whitstable.

“I put political pieces in the window which get people stopping and cars hooting,” she chuckles. “At the moment, I have got a decapitated Donald Trump which says, ‘send him back’.

“I am really happy spending time with visitors and hearing their stories - sometimes they find their way into my art. In a way, its like being a reporter still.”

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