Family means everything to Blockhead Jolene.
It’s why, just days after she and husband Adam left for The Block, a call from her mum left her torn in two and ready to call it quits on her reality TV journey before it had even begun.
“She had phoned me and asked me to be off mic,” Jolene recalls of the heartbreaking moment her mum Janelle told her the lung cancer she’d previously had surgery to remove, had come back in multiple places.
“She had quite a big portion of her lung cut out,” the 42-year-old explains of her mum’s 2025 surgery.
“She recovered for a little bit [but it was] a really slow healing process,” she says.
“I knew something was going on, but it’s so hard when you’re in The Block bubble to be available,” Jolene adds of the moment her mum, 65, told her the cancer was back.
“She told me she would start chemo and radiation.”
In our exclusive chat, Jolene tells New Idea she was ready to pack up and head home to take care of her mum, but Janelle had other ideas.
“She said to me, ‘You need to stay there and win this thing,’” Jolene says of her “incredibly proud” mum.
In fact, she says it was Janelle – a “massive Block fan” – who pushed her and Adam, 48, to apply.
“Even if we didn’t believe that we could do it, Mum said, ‘You need to do it.’
“It was hard for me to stay in the zone because a part of you feels torn about going home,” she adds.
Jolene did all she could to stay in touch as regularly as possible and tells us she called her mum or her sister every second day.
This week, Jolene and Janelle have an emotional reunion when Janelle visits Mount Eliza for family day.
“She was definitely struggling physically to visit – it was taking a lot out of her and she was very short of breath, but she was so adamant she was going to come down,” an emotional Jolene tells us.
Sadly, due to start her new treatment, Janelle won’t be able to support her daughter at the finish line.
“She has said to me there’s no way that she’s going to make it down for the auctions, which is a bit sad,” Jolene reveals.
“She has finished the chemotherapy and the radiation, but she’s had many other issues with the immunotherapy,” she says, adding that “she just got out of hospital again last week, so she’s still going through it.”
But you can bet Janelle will be watching on as her daughter’s home goes under the hammer.
