Knocked around by an infection due to chemotherapy sending his ‘white cells down to zero,’ The Living Room co-host and builder-designer Barry Du Bois had had ‘a couple of tough days emotionally’ but felt well enough for a drop-in from his buddy and co-host Amanda Keller.
Sharing footage from her visit to his Sydney hospital room on Feb. 23, Keller acknowledged the team on the Network Ten lifestyle show had ‘all missed him so much.’ During her visit, ‘we laughed and cried in equal measure,’ Keller told Sydney’s Daily Telegraph. ‘There is a lot to be optimistic about.’
Looking around his room, ‘You’ve been here more than a week and you haven’t even renovated!’ she joked. Indeed, after 18 days inside the same four walls the builder-designer was missing his twins, Bennett and Arabella, 5, who now have started school, and wife, Leonie, who had been diagnosed with cervical cancer in 2004. ‘I haven’t seen the kids for so long and I can only see Leonie for a short amount of time,’ he said.
Du Bois, 57, fought off plasmacytoma in 2010 but on Oct. 20, in a moving on-show announcement, he revealed cancer had returned ‘reasonably aggressively’ in the form of multiple myeloma. ‘It’s going to be a tough gig,’ he conceded, but ‘I’m going to beat what I’ve got, and hopefully inspire others to do so, too.’
Substitute host Grant Denyer found the gap left by Du Bois, who he calls ‘a beautiful, brave human being,’ to be ‘quite intimidating, hoping you can kind of maintain that same sort of magic,’ he told WHO, adding, ‘but knowing that I’m never going to be a Barry.’
This article originally appeared on WHO.
