Olivia bares her own soul
OLIVIA Newton John flew in from Los Angeles for Raelene Boyle’s tribute lunch yesterday and revealed intimate details of her own fight with breast cancer. “When I saw how many men there are in this room, I felt a bit intimidated,” she told the crowd of 600 in the Regent Hotel ballroom.
Before she was diagnosed with cancer five years ago she said that she would have “cringed” at the thought of revealing secrets to strangers. “But I owe it to myself and other women to talk about it because if it could happen to me it could happen to anyone.”
Tanned, youthful and slim in a grey pantsuit, the 48-year old divorced singer and mother-of-one said she had always been healthy, had exercised and didn’t smoke or drink. But like many women, she had the stress of trying to combine motherhood, marriage and a career, which she thinks took a toll on her immune system. In 1992, her father died of liver cancer. A week later, Olivia found she herself had breast cancer. “Being in denial I laughed about it because what else could I do. I never said, Why me? I said, Why not me?”
Breast cancer, she said, is a worldwide epidemic, affecting one in eight women, “and rising”. She told of waking up late one night and going downstairs and being so frightened of dying she could barely walk. But from her life-threatening illness she “learned more and grew more from this experience than any other in my life. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, but I do consider it a gift.” She told how surgeons performed a “modified radical mastectomy with a reconstruction on the table.” Then she went through six months of chemotherapy, scared that when a needle went into her arm she would die.
But she came to see the drugs “as healthy, not poison”. She said women with breast cancer often have the characteristic in common that they help others before themselves. She finds it telling that the breast “is the symbol of nurturing”. She finished her 10-minute speech by saying she and Raelene are “sisters in the war” against cancer.
Much-married John Singleton, acting as master of ceremonies, lightened up proceedings when he took the microphone from Olivia and said “I’ve had some success myself with that line: I love you, I honestly love”.