Leslie Ash has reportedly won more than £500,000 in damages for her hospital superbug drama, which halted her TV career and almost killed her.

The payout comes just weeks before she was due to start a £1m lawsuit against the NHS. Her lawyers said that Ash lost out on "hundreds of thousands of pounds" in future earnings, and told the Daily Mirror that “Matters are at a delicate stage, but we are no longer going to court. It will be settled this week.”

Life started rosy for Leslie Ash, bursting onto our screens in 1964 asking "Mummy, why are your hands so soft?" in an effort to get our impressionable minds to wash our dishes with Fairy Liquid. Her most famous role was as Neil Morrissey’s romantic interest Deborah in the BBC’s Men Behaving Badly. It was a ratings success, pulling in over 10 million viewers at its peak – the beautiful Leslie was on top of the world.

But it all started to fall apart on that fateful, vanity punishing day, when she said “Hello there, Mr Plastic Surgeon. I am really gorgeous already and should probably be thankful for that, but my fashion sense is tingling. The Puffer fish look is coming in, and I want to be the pioneer.” Alas, nobody followed suit, and she was fucking humiliated.

And it went even further down-hill from there. She contracted Staphylococcus aureus (MSSA) – a variant of Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) after being admitted to London's Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in April 2004, with a punctured lung and two broken ribs, which she claimed were the result of 'vigorous' sex with her husband, ex-footballer Lee Chapman.

Vigorous. 

(Yes. It begs the question: What kind of sexual act would lead to these injuries? Maybe Chapman is akin to Lennie from John Steinbeck’s
Of Mice and Men, thinking that the tighter he squeezed her, the more love he was showing? Or perhaps Chapman was bored of the regular orifices and wondered if the chest would work as one? We just don’t know. If you, dear reader, have any suggestions, then please leave them in the comment box below.)

She was discharged days later but returned after losing all feeling in her legs – and ended up confined to a wheelchair. Today she can only walk with the aid of a stick.

With the reported £500,000 soon to be safely in Leslie Ash's back pocket, we are left to wonder what she will spend it on. Unfortunately, the technology isn’t yet available to return her lips to former glories, but hecklerspray has a plan B: Instead of shrinking your lips, why not put collagen in every other part of your head, until the lips-to-face ratio is back to normal? This, of course, will then disrupt your head-to-body ratio, but that’s nothing that a bomber jacket and stilts couldn’t hide.

Leslie, you’re very welcome.

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