Carrie Bickmore: from heartache comes hope
Carrie Bickmore used her 2015 Gold Logie moment to campaign for brain cancer research and now – with a new foundation and beanies for sale – her $1 million goal is in sight. She talks to Susan Horsburgh about the disease and the comfort she’s found by ma
FOR A DECADE, every trip to The Royal Melbourne Hospital seemed to be tinged with dread. With her husband, Greg Lange, locked in an unwinnable battle with brain cancer, Carrie Bickmore remembers lurching from one MRI to the next, her stomach churning every time they had to wait for test results.
“That’s the thing – it goes on for so long,” says The Project co-host. “There are periods of inactivity where you go for the MRI and there’s no change, and you go, ‘Hey, we can breathe for another six months’, but it’s only six months that you’re breathing for, and then, in the months leading up to the next MRI, you’re already fearing what that result is going to be. It’s just a cycle and it goes round and round and round.”
Stealthy and capricious, brain cancer not only assaults the body, but also the mind. “It changes who you are,” says the 35-year-old. “It changes your ability to dream, to look forward ... I spent so many years feeling no hope – like, no hope.”
In April, however, five years after losing her husband, Carrie walked through those same hospital doors and handed The RMH Neuroscience Foundation a cheque for $250,000 – money that will fund a research project to develop a cheap, simple blood test for brain cancer. “I felt like, actually, there could be hope,” recalls Carrie. “It was a really special moment for me.”
And it all began with a blue beanie. Last year, when Carrie won the Gold Logie award for the country’s most popular TV personality, she plucked up the courage to pull on a beanie and make an impassioned plea for more research
into brain cancer, giving millions of Australians a glimpse into what she went through with Greg before his death in 2010.
“Over 10 years, I watched him suffer multiple seizures a day, lose feeling down one side of his body, have his little three-year-old have to push him around in a wheelchair because he couldn’t walk anymore,” she said, fighting back tears. “No one should have to go through that.”
Her husband often wore beanies, she explained, because he used to be embarrassed by the scars on his head. The day after the Logies, just as she had asked, TV personalities whacked on their woolly headgear and viewers flooded brain cancer charities with donations. Carrie was touched and astounded.
She had only given birth to Evie, her child with new partner Chris Walker, six weeks earlier, but after starting the brain cancer conversation, she knew she had to keep it going. “I’m a mum with two kids and I work full-time, so I don’t really have a lot of spare time, but after the
Logies I thought, I really have to do this now,” she says, “I have to be the leader.”
In “one of the most full-on years” of her life, she has set up a foundation, Carrie’s Beanies 4 Brain Cancer, and has already raised well over $500,000, first with the BrainBeats music festival in Melbourne last December, which featured Ed Sheeran and Vance Joy, and now with a range of fashion beanies on sale online at carriesbeanies4braincancer.com. If the beanies sell out, the foundation could crack the $1 million mark.
It’s a testament to Carrie’s popularity and the positive power of celebrity. “I never would have thought saying something just so close to my heart was then going to throw people into action,” she says. “There are many complexities to the job that I do, but one of the upsides is that I can use my voice for good, and I do feel like I have a responsibility to do that. I’m really trying to leave an incredible legacy for my husband, and for my son, too, to show the difference that you can make and the power you have.”
The fundraising efforts intentionally target the young because brain cancer kills more people under the age of 40 than any other cancer, and more children than any other disease. Each year, about 1600 Australians are diagnosed and 80 per cent of them will die of the disease.
There is no cure, so often the best sufferers can hope for is to buy time. “I can’t pretend to be the one suffering – I was just watching someone suffer for 10 years,” says Carrie, “but the hardest part was the waiting and not knowing.
“You get told, ‘This will come back and this will kill you, but when, we can’t guarantee.’ Oh, okay, so we’ll just go live life and get married and have a family because if we don’t, then we’re really wasting what precious time we have together, but at the same time, we know that in doing all those things there’s a chance we’re not going to enjoy all of that time together and, for Greg, see his son grow up.”
Carrie and Greg married in December 2005, five years after he was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumour, and had their son, Oliver, two years later. Greg died when Ollie was only three.
For Carrie, trying to hold it all together when she was still only in her 20s was exhausting and lonely – “I think I felt very isolated for a very long time” – which is why she feels compelled to reach out to others. It’s heartbreaking to talk about that time in her life, but she realises now that she was never going through it alone.
“I feel very much part of a community that I didn’t feel before, and it’s nice to talk about Greg as well,” she says. “It’s been strangely comforting and it feels really good to be able to do something positive out of something that’s just utterly devastating.”
Carrie may have since had another child with another love, but that hasn’t diminished Greg’s place in her life. “A lot of people use the words, ‘second chance’, ‘new life’ and all the rest of it,” she says. “Greg will forever be in my current life. Every time I look at my son, I’m seeing Greg – he looks so much like him.
Yes, there are different chapters to my life, but what we went through and who Greg is and the impact he’s had on my life will be with me always.”
When Greg was sick, he and
Carrie spent hours talking about ways they could help the cause, but just getting through each day – trying to pay the bills and keep him healthy – was a full-time job.
Now she is doing it for both of them. “I think he’d be so excited by the idea that he has been able to make a difference,” says Carrie. “I mean, the only reason I can do this is because of him.”