‘Now I was

Heart-throb pop star Stan Walker has spent two years in and out of hospital as he fights a disease that has ravaged his family. He tells Bridget Jones what has kept him going through some of his darkest days.

YES, the rumours are true, Stan Walker had cancer. The key word – had. The 27-year-old singer has had his stomach removed , but that was just the beginning of a health battle that, he says, almost killed him. And now? Well, he certainly doesn’t want your sympathy.

Walker has now opened up to Sunday News about the genetic mutation that gave him an 80 percent chance of getting stomach cancer, the two-year battle during which he lost the ‘‘joy for everything I love, singing, relationships, family’’ and why ‘‘the cancer was the easiest part. The deadliest, but the easiest.’’

Because of his family history with cancer – ‘‘I’ve watched so many people die in front of me. Over half the coffins in our Marae are from cancer’’ – and following his MumApril’s battle with breast cancer, he’d undergone tests in Melbourne and was told it was best if he had his stomach removed. Advice he ‘‘just blanked’’.

‘‘This time, I told them to call Mumif they needed to contact me. And she called me, crying. ‘Son, they think they’ve found some cancer, but they’re not sure.’ An hour later, she called again and told me they had found cancer,’’ he says.

Eventually, Walker had his stomach removed on September 14, 2017.

‘‘Nothing was really going on in my head the night before surgery. I just ate and ate everything. And man, it was good. It was sad too, because I love food. I went on a takeaway binge, three times a day, beforehand. It got so bad I started losing my taste buds,’’ he says.

Now his oesophagus is attached to his small intestines, which operates as a small stomach – within six months, he’s expected to be eating