Jackie O is stepping down from her radio show due to health reasons.
One half of The Kyle & Jackie O Show announced the shock news on Monday morning, revealing that she’d been struggling with her health ever since contracting COVID-19 earlier this year.
As a result, Jackie O was advised by her doctor to take a much-needed break from her radio co-hosting duties in order to give her body time to recuperate.
“Ever since picking up that virus, I’ve been to the doctor several times and he said because I’ve been pushing myself every day, after the show all I’ve been doing is sleeping and I’m not getting better,” she explained on her radio show.
“I just have to take some time off,” she added. “I’m ending the show today. As in now.”
After co-host Kyle Sandilands jokingly asked if she was dying, Jackie O replied that she was just in need of some “serious rest.”
“(The doctor) basically said, ‘if you keep doing this, this is going to get much worse,’ and I’ve taken his advice,” she explained.
According to Jackie O, she’ll only be away from her radio show “for a couple of weeks,” although no exact return date has been confirmed yet. She firmly added that she would be “all better” and “back soon.”
It sounded like a tough decision for her to make. “You know how much this show means to me, you know how much I push through everything, and I would not be doing this unless I absolutely had to,” she told her co-host.
The shock break comes after Jackie O and Kyle were confirmed to be the king and queen of Sydney breakfast radio, beating the formidable Ben Fordham in the latest round of radio ratings.
The Kyle & Jackie O Show also earned the highest number of listeners ever recorded for any Aussie radio show in the recent radio ratings, with a whopping 818,000 listeners.
