Carrie Bickmore has broken down during an emotional appearance on last night’s episode of Ahn Do’s Brush With Fame on the ABC.
The Project host was the celebrity guest on this week’s episode and opened up about her heartbreaking journey following her late husband, Greg Lange’s brain cancer diagnosis.
“It was about a year after we moved to Melbourne, I think I was still 21 or 22 and he was about 25,” she recalled.
“He had a seizure at home and one thing led to another and they diagnosed him with a brain tumour … I didn’t know anything about brain cancer, neither did he.”
“It just completely threw everything we knew, everything we had planned, everything we had thought … it just threw everything on its head. It was the start of an incredibly hard journey.”
Carrie and Greg went on to marry in 2005 and welcomed their son Oliver in 2007, which Carrie described as “probably the greatest thing we ever did together.”
“We didn’t speak a lot about what might happen,” Bickmore told Do, fighting back the tears “We were about hope and positivity.”
Lange eventually lost his battle with the disease in 2010, but the TV star says his memory lives on through their son.
“This sounds so weird but often I’ll see him (Oliver) in the shower and the back of his body and his frame is just like a miniature version of Greg,” the TV star says. “They’re very, very similar. It was a great thing for both of us to have him and have that focus.”
Carrie went on to found Carrie’s Beanies For Brain Cancer a charity raising funds and awareness for brain cancer research and has since raised over $5 million.
“The generosity and the number of people who have come to me and emailed or phoned and said, ‘I have brain cancer, thank you for raising awareness,’ says Carrie, who famously used her 2015 Gold Logie acceptance speech to raise awareness.
“I kind of just wish that he (Greg) could have seen all these messages to have realised how many people were going through a similar thing.”
