“It wasn’t a matter of if, it was a matter of when “recalls Belinda. “The little bastards were going to get me. It was a weird sensation, almost an out-of-body experience. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to explain it. It felt like I was moving in a dream and, though I wanted to, I couldn’t wake myself up.

“I didn’t cry much. I guess that was the shock. I kept thinking about my family and having to tell them, and what Rove was feeling. That shock took hold and stayed with me for the next couple of weeks. Then the fighting instincts kicked in.”

During the past 12 months, since she first heard that grim prognosis, Belinda Emmett has been on a journey of self-discovery. She has uncovered facets of her personality that she never imagined, long-dormant character traits that even now make her smile with a warm sense of personal pride and personal satisfaction. She has discovered that hidden beneath her slender frame is indeed the heard of a fighter, a heart that now brims with a hard-won confidence in her ability to survive.

At 28, Belinda Emmett has already survived a bout with breast cancer. A malignant tumor was successfully removed during an operation in 1998. She believed the threat was behind her, that she was free, but the discovery of the secondary cancer in September last year, while she was filming the movie The Nugget, changed all that. Belinda was forced to confront her won mortality and perhaps even more significantly and take control of her future.

With a combination of natural therapies, diet, meditation, conventional medicine and the unconditional love and support of her friends and family, Belinda is, she believes, on the road to a remarkable recovery. Her bones, once fragile and peppered with cancer, are healing and growing stronger with every passing day. And while she acknowledges that nobody can predict her future, she hopes with every fibre of her being that hers will be a long and happy one. “I was hoping to be a little further along the track before I spoke out,” says Belinda. “I hoped to have a few more pieces of the puzzle, but circumstances have conspired to force my hand. A newspaper article created an impression that I wasn’t doing very well, that I was about to drop off the twig. I had to put the record straight. People were writing to me and saying that I gave them hope and, if I wasn’t doing very well, then what happens to them? I don’t want people thinking that I’m dying when I’m not. “I’m doing very well. I am probably about 75 per cent of the way there and I have great hopes for the future. Cancer is a word everyone is frightened of. It can be terrifying, but it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s an imbalance in your body. It’s a health crisis. It’s challenges. It’s a lot of things, but it isn’t necessarily linked to death. I just want people to know that when cnventional medicine doesn’t have the answers there are alternatives.”

“I’d had some back pain about six months before, “says Belinda. “I had never suffered from back pain before, so I went to a doctor, another oncologist, to get it checked out. He said not to worry about it, that it would be fine. I thought it must have been just general lower back pain, but it was persistent and it kept rearing its ugly heard every now and again. It was while we were filming that it became really intense and I went to the local doctor to get it checked out. I had some X-rays and he sent me off to have some scans in Sydney.

The scans were completed that same afternoon. Rove flew up from Melbourne to join her and the next morning they sat in Belinda’s oncologist office. “The news was devastating, not just for me, but for Rove too, “says Belinda. “The prognosis wasn’t good. I was told, “This is it.” At 27 years of age, that’s a very difficult thing to hear, let alone come to terms with. As I said, I think I was in shock for a couple of weeks, but it was during that couple of weeks that I started to have the feeling that for whatever reason I would be okay. Not that I said, “oh, I’ll be fine, don’t worry about it.” Of course there was all of the anguish and all of the feelings that goes with news like that. “But there was something inside me that kept telling me that I would figure out a way. I am a resourceful woman, and I knew I would figure something out. I don’t know how I knew that but I did”.

She also wanted to finish The Nugget. A few days later, she went back to Mudgee and took up where she had left off a few days before. The film’s shooting schedule was reorganized so that all Belinda’s scenes could be shot in a single week. Rove spent the week with Belinda and her parents, Michael 51, and Laraine 50, who travelled from their home on the NSW Central Coast, to join them. “Mum and Dad were pretty distraught at first, but when they saw me face to face and we could talk, I think they felt better, “ says Belinda. “Having them with me and having Rove with me helped to make that week in Mudgee a really special experience. The cast and crew all pulled together for us. It was actually quite lovely.

Her courage during the time deeply impressed her father, Michael. “Belinda is probably the most courageous person I know, “he says. “Our only thought was to get to her as soon as possible. She was the glue that held the family together when we first heard and she has been a tower of strength ever since.”

With her film role completed, Belinda went back to Sydney to start chemotherapy. At the same time, she decided to follow her instincts about finding her own solution. “I guess it was just being around my family and Rove, and my friends. Everybody comes together when something like this happens and that just made me think I will do whatever I have to do to stick around. And so that was it. I knew I wanted to try to do something about it myself.”

As she read, Belinda became convinced that she could combine natural healing with orthodox treatment to beat her disease. She also became unwilling to accept the prognosis that had been presented to her. “I came to the conclusion that I couldn’t accept what I was being told, “ she says. “A medical prognosis is nothing more than a guess. I know that I won’t be endearing myself to medical professionals across the country when I say this, but a prognosis doesn’t really mean very much. “There are so many factors involved that affect a person when they fall sick, so many variables that I don’t believe anyone can confidently predict what is going to happen in a case such as this. If a person is told they are going to die in five years and accept that, then they probably will die in five years. It’s like pointing the bone; your psyche is all set up for it. I wasn’t going to let that happen.”

At the same time, and for the next four months, Belinda underwent chemotherapy. “I think I cruised though it pretty well,” she says. “I lost my hair, but I didn’t have any of the nausea that usually comes with chemo, so that was good. I did get really tired, but it wasn’t too bad. I took up alternative treatments. I had acupuncture and Chinese herbs, and I switched to a macrobiotic diet.” Chemotherapy ended in December last year. “I believe that it bought me the time that I needed,” says Belinda. “It stopped the cancer from spreading and brought it to a halt. That was a relief. And since then I have been pretty much on my own. It’s just been me decided what I want to do. I believed that the body could heal itself given the right environment and that was what I set out to do.

Until then, Belinda and Rove McManus, a comedian and the popular host of the Ten Network’s Rove live late night talk show, had conducted a loving but long distance relationship that stretched between his home in Melbourne and hers in Sydney. It was time for a change, the first of many. “I had been living on and off in Melbourne for the past two years, virtually from the time we met, but it was just sort of weekends. When I came out of chemotherapy, we thought, stuff `stuff this, we’re not doing this any more´, so in January I moved down here permanently. “It was just what I needed. Rove and I wanted to be together. We wanted to be a normal couple. This to-ing and fro-ing, and working out schedules was just bullshit. It makes you realise that none of that stuff is important. What is important if you love someone is that you are together and as happy as you can be. “That’s important. After that, everything else will just fall into place.”

Belinda set out to examine every aspect of her life. She took stock of where her life was headed, where she had been and who she really was. “I started to look at myself from an holistic point of view,” she says. “During the past 10 months, I have read everything I can get my hands on about cancer, and while I think I can confidently say that I know everything there is to know about it, I can also say that I know nothing about it. There’s still this great mystery factor about why. “I used to lead such a hectic lifestyle, running here and there like a mad woman. I am not saying this is the cause, but perhaps it was a factor. I never took the time to contemplate my life. I don’t think I knew myself very well at all. But during the past 12 months, I’ve had a lot of time to get to know myself better. I isolated myself from the rest of the world. I still had my family and my friends, and Rove, but I was hibernating and thinking. I don’t think I had as much respect for myself as I do now. I think I am impressed that I am as resilient as I am. I don’t like being miserable. I don’t like feeling bad about my life. If there is more kind of positive aspect to a situation then, God damn it, I will find it because I want to be happy. I want to feel good.”

She also started to explore more natural therapies. Often she would read about treatments and then bump into someone who knew where the treatment was being conducted. Or she would meet someone who knew about it. Synchronicity. It led her to several therapists who are now helping to treat her. “There is still a lot more to do,” says Belinda. “I don’t want to say too much at the moment, but the treatments I am undergoing are mostly natural. But really, it is a combination of things. “I meditate every day and I exercise every morning, a walk of about 40 minutes. I try to make sure that everything that goes into my body is pure, but it’s really about looking at every lever of my life.”

She is detoxifying her system, shedding the last vestiges of her old self and replenishing her body with wholesome new building blocks. As unlikely as it might seem to some, she says, it is working. During the past few months, Belinda’s eyes have changed colour, from green to an engaging deep sea blue, an indication, perhaps, of the greater transformation taking place in other parts of her body. “I am at the point where it is not threatening my life at the moment, “ says Belinda. “I am healing, I am getting better, but I am not out of the woods. I am still in the process of that at the moment, so I am still in the midst of it all. I am just going to keep going, keep doing what I have been doing. I think it can only get better and better. I am confident that I am fine. It’s not totally alternative because I still have an oncologist and I still have regular checks and things. I am sort of using both, but definitely during the past 10 months it has been more of the natural treatments. And I believe it’s the natural treatments that have given me the healing that I have had so far, but I am not anti-orthodox or anything like that. This is the best way for me to go at this point.”

You watch someone taking the little things for granted and you remember when you could do that as well, and you just want to me anybody else but who you are at that point. Because you wish that your road could be a little less rocky, that things could be a little easier, but then that fades and that fighting spirit kicks back in. “There is nothing that makes me angry, but there is sometimes a sense of frustration: people having babies, that’s always hard for me. They might take it for granted and think it’s just a natural thing that happens to everyone. Or when people say things such as, “I’m getting so old, I am so old, when I think that would be great. I just want to be able to say I am old. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s those things that people take for granted, that I won’t take for granted ever again.”

Another important factor, she says, is the unqualified support she has received from those around her. “Rove has been with me from the very first day,” says Belinda. “He is very similar to me. We see the world in the same way. He has been amazing. We just decided that this was not the final word that we could figure something out together. He’s my rock. He doesn’t flinch. I don’t think I could have come through this as well as I have if I didn’t have him by my side. “There is incredible amount of love from my family as well. They are there for me every day, whenever I need it. We have always been very close and their love is very important. I will do my damnedest to stick around and I honestly believe that will be the outcome. I will do whatever I can to have the fairytale ending.”

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