Police Minister Lisa Neville opens up about her secret health battle

Police Minister Lisa Neville has returned after six-months off work as she underwent surgery and battled a flare up of a chronic bowel disease.

The Labor MP has lived with Crohn’s disease for 30 years.

Her most recent bout of serious illness landed her in intensive care and Ms Neville says, at one point, she feared she “wasn’t going to be coming back to work”.

“I was kicking myself for having left it so long during last year and the beginning of this year to get treatment,” she told Neil Mitchell.

“There’s no question it can kill you and you’ve just got to try and make sure that you’re doing the right things. I left it way too long.”

Ms Neville has hidden her battle from most of her colleagues, taking “a lot of Gastro-Stop” to manage chronic diarrhoea.

“It’s a really significant thing,” she said.

“Last year, for the first time ever at work, I was doing a press conference with the Premier and I had to say … as he was introducing me, ‘could somebody else speak first’?”

Ms Neville also shared the circumstance surrounding her trip to Port Douglas while on leave from work.

She said she was “certainly very upset” by the media coverage of the trip, revealed the public scrutiny caused her health to decline further.

Press PLAY below to hear the full interview

Image: Nine News