Belinda pours her heart out to Olivia
Belinda Emmett is bubbling over with excitement. “I’ve just come back from meeting Olivia and I’m as high as a kite”, she beams. Belinda, who as Rebecca on Home And Away is a recognised star in her own right, is herself starstruck and she’s proud of it.
After completing six weeks of radiation therapy following the removal of a malignant breast lump, Belinda has just returned from visiting perhaps the world’s most international survivor of breast cancer superstar Olivia Newton-John and she is still coming down to earth.
For any Australian girl in her 20s to meet Olivia has to be a big deal because she is just incredible, Belinda enthuses.
She says Olivia is a role model for all the young female Home And Away actors.
“We’re all Grease fanatics and Olivia was just thus beautiful blonde thing that we all wanted to be,” she says. “I’ve got a lot of very envious friends.”
“It’s just surreal. I followed Olivia’s story when she had breast cancer and I remember thinking, “God! Olivia can’t die! Not Olivia!” Not understanding anything about breast cancer then, I thought it was always fatal.”
“So it is ironic that six years down the track I was diagnosed with cancer and Olivia is telling me, “You’ll be okay”. It is really bizarre.”
After her diagnosis in April, Belinda said no one could really understand how she felt being told she had breast cancer but the day she met Olivia, those feelings of isolation just melted away.
“When we were getting our photos taken, somebody said: “You look like sisters!” That is the biggest compliment anyone’s ever paid me.”
You do feel a common bond and I felt she was very familiar. Olivia was saying to me, “What did you have done? Oh, I did that. Oh, yeah, I’ve been there.”
“Knowing we’d both been through the same emotions, it was like she was a friend even though I’d never met her before. I think she felt it a little as well”.
And Olivia did.
“We had an immediate bond because we’ve been through the same thing,” Olivia says. “And it was a real pleasure to meet Belinda because she’s so sweet. She’s a wonderfully positive and charming young woman. She has handled the situation with great maturity and I believe she’s going to be perfectly fine now.”
Belinda, who was diagnosed three days after her 24th birthday, got her first dose of Olivia’s support via New Idea while she was in hospital recovering from her surgery. Andrew Clark, her soccer player boyfriend, was at her side when Belinda’s face on the cover of New Idea suddenly appeared on the TV screen.
“It was quite funny,” she recalls. “Oh, I’m on the cover! And look, Livvy sends her love!” It was a surreal moment and very touching,”
Olivia then wrote Belinda a letter and included her phone number
“It took me two days to get up the courage to call her,” Belinda recalls.
However, plans were soon under way for the two to meet in LA. and Olivia certainly didn’t disappoint.
“She is just a lovely, lovely lady, sighs Belinda. “So beautiful. She was just like “Come in, sit down, have a drink and tell me about it.”
“Some other breast cancer survivors - Diahann Carroll and Shirley Temple Black were also there and she introduced me. It was just like being a member of this elite club,” Belinda says. “It was very strange. I had never been so happy to be a breast cancer survivor!”
Once they were alone, Olivia and Belinda had more of a heart-to-heart.
They both consider themselves very lucky to have been been spared the trauma of waking up after surgery with a breast missing.
“I had a lumpectomy, a partial,” Belinda explains. “And Olivia had a modified radical mastectomy with a simultaneous full reconstruction.”
Belinda’s initial fear that she would lose her hair was never realised as she didn’t require chemotherapy. Although Olivia did require chemotherapy, she too lost none of her hair.
Chemo is pretty traumatic, though, Belinda says. “It’s going through your whole system, whereas the radiation is just on the section that was operated on. I breezed through radiotherapy, I didn’t have any side effects whatsoever.”
When Olivia, who turns 50 next month, was diagnosed in 1992, she already had her daughter Chloe, then six years old. The fact that Belinda still had her heart set or having children, created a dilemma over the use of the much-publicised new Breast cancer drug Tamoxifen, which isn’t recommended for young women as it can affect their fertility.
“That was probably the thing that upset me most,” Belinda admits. “The only two things that I couldn’t handle were not surviving - leaving the planet wasn’t an option - and not being able to have children. I could handle radiation therapy and everything else but I couldn’t face not being able to have children. So I opted not to take Tamoxifen”
She further safeguarded her chances of being a mother by having a piece of her ovarian wall, containing eggs, removed and placed in storage.
Olivia’s legendary belief in the power of positive thought shone through at her meeting with Belinda and she was typically upbeat. She told Belinda. “You’ve got a great attitude and I know that you’re going to be absolutely fine.”
Both Olivia and Belinda felt the additional pressure of trying to deal with their condition while being in a high-profile glamour industry. Belinda felt it especially acutely when talking to the doctors.
“It was hard because we didn’t know whether I was going to have to lose the whole breast,” she explains. “They were saying, “Oh, you can wear a prosthesis and you’ll still be able to do the gardening”, because they were used to dealing with older women.”
And I’m thinking, “I’m 24! I want to know if I can wear a string bikini! I don’t care if I can do the goddamn gardening. I’m working on Home And Away and it’s always summer in Summer Bay - you’re always in cozzles and tiny strappy things.”
“I was thinking, “Wow, I just hope I can still look normal.” I’d never thought myself to be physically perfect. I’ve always felt a bit inferior and when something like this happens you feel you’ve moved a little bit further back behind the eight ball.”
“But once you’ve got through it, those little physical imperfections don’t seem so important any more. And I can still pretty much wear most things.”
Being in the public eye, Belinda also felt under pressure not to fall apart emotionally.
“It was really hard,” Belinda admits. “You want to get through it and show other people it can be done and be like a leader, so there is a purpose to it all. It is extra pressure to do well but it is also an excellent goal.”
Despite Belinda’s excellent prognosis, she has check-ups every three months. “The next two years is apparently when it’s a little hit touch-and-go,” she says “If, God forbid, it did come back. I’m sure I would nip it in the bud fairly early. Anyway, I’m on the case.”
Cancer doesn’t discriminate: neither Olivia nor Belinda had a family history of the disease. And Belinda was aware of her lump for a few years before she took action.
She was lulled into a false sense of security because she was so young.
Only when her biopsy result prompted doctors to remove a larger section a core biopsy did Belinda really begin to get frightened. Then, came the news she had dreaded. It was cancer.
“There were a couple of tears but I wasn’t overly emotional,” she recalls. “I went numb and I stayed numb. The emotions at that point were shut off. I thought, “I’ve got to be strong, got to think clearly, I’ve got to cope. Let’s not feel anything right now, let’s leave that until later on.” I just got on with it. I was still making jokes, going out with my friends, having a laugh.”
Belinda believes those days were even harder for her family, her parents Michael and Laraine, sister Lesley and brothers Matthew and Shane.
“My mother was a mess but she was good, she was tough”, Belinda says. “My dad is always good in a crisis. But everybody was very upset.”
Olivia thinks Belinda is lucky to have Andrew in her life.
“It is wonderful for her that she has a good man who has stuck by her through her ordeal because love is an important part of the healing process,” she says.
Belinda believes the hardest time for Andrew was waiting for her to come out of surgery.
“I know he was having a heart attack at that point,” she says. “He was just really happy once the lump was gone, even before the pathology results came back.”
Olivia has always favoured the natural approach to good health and had to be persuaded to have chemotherapy by her family and her oncologist.
She believes it was right to have the chemo but also used homeopathy combined with herbs, acupuncture and yoga. And she game Belinda a big thumbs up on her healthy lifestyle.
“I was always very healthy and I’m quite a good eater,” Belinda says. “I’ve exercised regularly, I eat lots of fruit and vegetables and don’t smoke.”
“Olivia thought my lifestyle was wonderful. Olivia considers herself cured. She doesn’t like the word remission it sounds like it’s just lurking there. I feel the same way.”
“As far as I’m concerned, it’s gone and it is not coming back. I’ve got rid of it. End of story”
Belinda has been fortunate with her work. She is hosting the All Time Greatest Bloopers TV show, while Home And Away folks welcomed her back on the set just four weeks into her sis-week radiation therapy course
Andrew, being between soccer seasons was able to join her on the trip to LA and the couple spent five days relaxing together in Hawaii en route.
Now, after six years of togetherness did Belinda’s life-threatening illness put a sharper focus on marriage!
“Not really”, Belinda laughs. ‘We’re the best of mates. We love each other dearly and we’ve always been very supportive of each other, but our philosophy is that we want to experience life as much as we can as individuals before we settle down, have a family and do all that sort of thing.”
“He’s got his soccer career and I’ve got my career. We’ve always agreed to be there for each other but to do our own thing for a while. Then, when you’ve been there and done that, there are no regrets.”
But, after doing their own things, do they have a definite plan to stay together? “Not a definite plan”, Belinda says.
“But you kind of feel it’s inevitable We’ve been together so long now, and been through so much together, I can’t imagine him not being around. We both realise how precious our life together is We now look at things a little differently, even without realising it.”
Belinda remembers sipping cocktails on a beach in Hawaii and saying to Andrew, “look where we are now. A couple of months ago, we just didn’t know. The future was a little uncertain. And here we are!”
Inspired by Olivia’s efforts to spread awareness of breast cancer, Belinda hopes to do her hit by getting younger women to be more vigilant.
“I emphasise the check-ups,” she says “I don’t want to scare women because I am a rare case but if you’ve got a lump get it checked out. Mammograms don’t always detect things in young women.”
Already, Belinda is beginning to see the positive aspects of her ordeal.
“Once you feel you’ve got through a life-and-death situation, you feel you can accomplish anything,” she says “Nothing is beyond you any more. That’s a nice feeling.”
“I’ve always believed in destiny and I believe I was sort of chosen tested to see if I had the strength to get through my whole life. When I passed, then I was ready for anything.”
If Belinda does have dark times, will she still look to Olivia for inspiration?
“Definitely, She was in my mind constantly because she was the one person I knew who I considered still young and vibrant and beautiful and amazing and still doing everything.”
“She didn’t seem to change. I thought, “If she can get through it, then so can I.”
By Sue Russell. Pictures: Michelle Day