Reporting news and weather in the South
16 February 2010
Mike Powell's diverse background includes training as a Catholic priest before circumnavigating the globe as an airline steward.
He started as a journalist at the age of 17 when he joined a national girls' magazine as sub-editor. Within a year the publishers asked him to become a reporter for the launch of a new music paper where he wrote three weekly columns and reviewed concerts and records.
After a career change Mike trained to be a catholic priest and worked in prisons, borstals and hospitals as well as his parish.
He then flew the world as cabin crew on British Airways. While he was there he presented and produced a training video which is still shown to all new recruits.
The media bug then caught him again and he found himself presenting the weather for the BBC in 1998.
Recently he's been presenting and reporting for TV in Bristol and for radio in the South and has spent the summer training up new cabin crew in between reading the news on Radio5Live.
His Sunday afternoon show on BBC Radio Solent is as wide-ranging as Mike's own career so far with subjects covered including geneaology, wildlife, past-life regression, UFO's…and of course the weather!
Mike always has a full body health check every two years. He works out and
swims at the gym three times a week, has never smoked, is the right weight
for his sex, age and height and eats plenty of fruit and veg. But despite
feeling great, his health check in the Summer of 2009 showed blood and
protein was present in his water/urine.
His GP referred him for an ultrasound and when that showed "abnormalities"
on both kidneys, he was booked for an urgent CT scan. The results led to a urologist telling Mike that he thought he may have kidney cancer. It was a complete bolt out of the blue and a huge shock.
In January 2010 Mike had an operation to remove a tumour on his left
kidney which turned out to be a 3.8cm renal cell carcinoma. Surgeons
decided that it would be prudent to also remove something else suspicious
on the right kidney. An operation for that is planned for this Summer.
Reading
