Delta Goodrem

Delta Goodrem

Delta Goodrem woke at 3.31 in the morning certain something was wrong

Content note — this story covers a subject some people would rather choose when to read.

Delta Goodrem was eighteen. Her first album had gone to number one at home in Australia and stayed there for months, she had just taken a third number one single, she had debuted at number two in the UK, and she was booked on a flight to the United States. She had also been unwell for a while, in ways that were easy to put down to the schedule. Rashes. Night sweats — something she says she only understood the significance of later. An exhaustion she kept overriding, because she is not someone who surrenders easily, which she says has been to her detriment. When she saw a doctor she was told it was stress, and she understands why: she was flying to Britain for a weekend of television and flying back to be on set. Then she found a lump in her neck. Small enough that you could not see it, she says — you could only feel it. It grew. One night she woke at 3.31 in the morning soaked through, frozen with fear after a nightmare. Her first thought was that someone had broken into the flat, that there was danger in the room. She rang her mother, then a friend, then the runner from the set. She told all of them the same thing: something is going to happen to me. They told her she was tired. She said no, she was very scared. She later wrote a song called 3.31. Her mother and her manager booked her in at the hospital for the Monday. On the Sunday she was on the front page of the national paper for the first time. On the Monday she went in on her own, and fainted during a biopsy needle into her neck. She says she saw it in the doctor's face before anyone said anything — that he knew. That evening there was a knock at the door and her mother and her brother walked in. She asked what was wrong. That was the first time she heard the word cancer. She had surgery the next morning. There was a mass in her neck, and she says it had spread beyond it. Within days the news was out — somebody at the hospital had said something — and by the Friday she had to make it public. Camera crews sat outside the family home. Letters arrived in numbers she still talks about. A stranger flew in from Hobart, knocked on the door with a cake, and was let in by mistake. Elton John rang her on her first day of chemotherapy to wish her luck, and she says you never forget people who are kind to you when you are that far down. She kept a diary through it. What it says, she says, is that she felt trapped — like an animal backed into a corner with nowhere to go, just shaking. She describes lying awake in the middle of the night trying not to fall asleep, in case something happened. At the ARIA Awards that year she collected the statues she had dreamed about all her life. It was the first time she had seen herself with no hair. She wore a blonde wig. Nothing here is medical advice. The NHS lists a painless lump or swelling — most often in the neck, armpit or groin — as the most common first sign of Hodgkin lymphoma, and night sweats among the others. It says these symptoms are far more often caused by something else, and to see a GP if you have them, because the earlier it is found the better treatment tends to work.

• Hodgkin lymphoma