Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
I’vewonmysecretbattle with prostate cancer...
Jono Coleman has secretly been battling prostate cancer. Unknown to everyone except close family and friends, the English-born Australian DJ and TV presenter was diagnosed a year ago in Sydney, where he stars on morning TV show Studio Ten, and hosts a nightly radio show on 2UE.
The long-time host of shows here on Virgin Radio, Heart FM and LBC, he won ITV’S Celebrity Fit Club in 2005 before returning to Australia with wife Margot and their two children.
The upbeat funnyman has continued to work throughout his gruelling chemotherapy and radiation treatment, and has only gone public now that it is at an end, and he is in the clear. He is campaigning to raise awareness, and encourages every man over 50 to be tested. I’m a glass half-full kind of guy, but that day in June last year when I was diagnosed, for a split second a chill went through my body and, it’s a cliché, but my life flashed before my eyes.
I was supposed to be going to farewell drinks for a colleague, but instead I was lying on the exam table of Professor Phillip Stricker of St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney with his finger up my bottom.
‘This is a different way to spend a Friday afternoon!’ I thought.
And he just said, straight out, ‘Your prostate is enlarged, there’s a hard lump on the side, and I’d say you’ve got cancer.’ I thought, ‘Jesus, what’s happening?’
I was there on my own: my wife Margot, who produces commercials, was about to fly off to film an ad for Toyota, and it’s not the sort of news you break on the phone. I had a radio show to do that evening. I was stunned.
I’d ended up in his office because ever since Celebrity Fit Club I’ve had a blood test every six months to check cholesterol and so on. They made me get my act together because my dad had died of a heart attack at 62 – the age I am now – and his mother had died young. They put me on statins and said, ‘If you want to see your children grow up you have to change your lifestyle.’
Doing the breakfast shows and having big boozy lunches writing restaurant reviews was a dangerous combination, and at one point I weighed 22 stone. I lost 35lb on the show, earned
£25,000 for charity, and was the first guy to use the ice cap, so I wouldn’t lose my hair. It wasn’t vanity, I just didn’t want viewers to wonder what was wrong with me.
The ice cap is like a big shower cap into which freezing cold water is pumped. You get brain freeze only 20 times worse. You know if you drink a frozen margarita too fast? Frankly I’d rather have had the margarita! And you end up with icicles in your hair after a couple of hours.
But I kept my hair, although the rest of my body hair drifted down the shower. And the chemo cleaned out the cancer that had spread, which left only the cancer on the prostate, which was zapped with seven weeks of daily radiation. You feel a bit jet-lagged from that.
Margot has been a rock, and we’re in this together. She has taken control of another important aspect and put us on the Mediterranean diet.
The thinking here is that prostate cancer, like breast cancer, thrives on