Australian Idol winner Stan Walker sits down with New Idea to reveal the truth about his diagnosis.
“Seriously, cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me. I’ve always been a weirdo! A lot of ups and a lot of downs led me to this incredible new season,” he says.
WATCH Stan Walker talk about his road to recovery after his cancer diagnosis.
The singer reckons he had to come within a heartbeat of dying before he truly learned to love life – and met the woman of his dreams, stunning Cook Islands photographer and conservationist Alex King.
Fully recovered after having his stomach removed due to that “lucky” cancer, Stan is on the comeback trail with a 10-date Australian tour and a new single ‘Give’.
What’s more, the 28-year-old star also hopes to start a family, once he’s plucked up the courage to propose to his ‘island queen’.
“I’d like to have seven kids but I know she’s not going to let me,” jokes the multi-talented singer, songwriter, actor and director, who credits Christianity with helping him overcome a sad and brutal childhood.
“Alex already has a 5-year-old daughter, who’s my little darling, and she’s the most incredible mum. They are my girls and my life now and when I’m with them in Rarotonga [in the Cook Islands], honest to God, it’s paradise.”
Today’s blissful happiness is a world away from July 2017, when Stan discovered he had fallen victim to his family’s curse – an inherited mutation of the CDH1 gene, which gives an 80 per cent chance of contracting stomach cancer.
Stan was the fifth generation of his close-knit Maori clan to be struck by the disease that has killed 25 of them.
His only chance was to have his stomach removed, and face the prospect that he might never sing again, or be dead within six months. Doctors who operated on him at Melbourne’s Freemasons Hospital discovered not one fast-growing stomach tumour, but 13.
At the time, in September 2017, the ‘Black Box’ hitmaker admits he didn’t care much. “I never cried once, I never felt sorry for myself, I wasn’t scared of what it would do.
“The cancer came at the end of a very long season of just losing everything – my passion, my joy in the industry, my money. I was just really unhappy in my whole life, and losing my health was the last part.”
Yet struggling through a series of post-operative complications – a collapsed lung, emergency gallbladder surgery and a life-threatening leak between his oesophagus and small intestine – Stan somehow regained his mojo, while shedding 24kg from his 88kg frame.
And then, on one of his first post-recovery trips away from home, he came face-to-face with 29-year-old Alex. “I’d been following her way before, for months, on Instagram because I thought she was a fine lady. Then we met on Rarotonga, in the Cook Islands, and the rest is history. She couldn’t resist me.”
Another giant guffaw. “It’s actually very different, I’m still trying to win her over,” admits joker Stan, whose weight has now stabilised at around 70kg.
So has he proposed? “Not yet, when that happens I probably won’t tell. I’m still on the way to earning her fully. She’s a hard lady, but she is the prize, I tell you. Hopefully, she will allow me heaps of children, but she already told me two or three is the limit!”
“The best thing for me is just my family,” grins Stan, gleefully explaining how his mum organised his upcoming tour, with proceeds going to the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne, the ground-breaking research institute that helped to save his life.
For more see this week’s New Idea, out now!
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