Gogglebox legend Tom Malone Jr breaks down in tears as he opens up about TV star brother’s health battle

GOOGLEBOX star Tom Malone was overcome with emotion as he opened about his brother’s terrifying health scare, which saw him put in a coma.

The 30-year-old, who appeared on the hit show with his parents Tom Sr, and Julie, revealed his younger sibling Shaun was  his inspiration in life after overcoming numerous brain surgeries when he was just 15.

Tom, who quit the show to concentrate on his career as a dancer, explained: “My younger brother got seriously ill, was in hospital, in a coma for a while.

“When he was 15, he got sinusitis, just like a cold that got infected. He must have had a tear because it  affected all his brain fluid.”

Chatting on the Power of the Ordinary podcast, he continued: “I put him in the back of the car because he was too big for my mum to carry.

“I do this thing when traumatic stuff happens or if I get some really bad news, I will just shut off and go into auto pilot and dive into something. So I went straight to training.

“Didn’t realise that as I’ve gone to training, he’s started to have a seizure in the back of the car. He’s gone to the hospital, they’ve put him in a drug induced coma.

“Give him a bunch of brain surgeries and told my mum and dad he had a one in ten chance of survival. They had to keep a part of his skull out so they could keep doing brain surgeries. He was covered in tubes.”

Fighting back tears Tom revealed the incredibly touching thing Shaun said when he came round.

“When he came out the coma, he had to learn to walk again because he was completely paralyzed on his left hand side,” he said.

“He’s probably the most inspirational person in my life and the first thing he said when he was out the coma is that he is glad it happened to me and not him because he wouldn’t be able to live without dancing.”

Shaun went on to appear on Gogglebox and has spoken about the scary experience himself, which was also filmed at the time for Children’s Hospital.

He previously revealed that no one knew how he would recover, the dad-of-one said: “I was in a coma for a few weeks – and they said to my mum and dad ‘Shaun’s got brain damage, we don’t know what the brain damage is or how it’ll affect him or if it’s going to be really bad.

“And when I woke up my brain damage affected me in some ways, like my memory but mostly the way it affected me was with my left side.

“I essentially had a stroke, I couldn’t move my left arm, my left leg, even the left side of my face. My sister has got pictures of me trying to eat.”