“Luckiest person on earth”: John Blackman shares health update
Australian TV personality John Blackman has opened up about the extreme surgery he underwent to remove a cancerous growth on his mouth and jaw.
John, who is best known for his voice work on the variety TV show Hey Hey It’s Saturday, was diagnosed with a basal cell carcinoma in 2018. The cancer, which had formed on his chin, is classed as both a rare and aggressive type of skin cancer.
John’s extensive surgery spanned 10 hours, and saw his jaw removed to be replaced with a bone from his leg.
Speaking to the You Cannot Be Serious podcast, he shed some insight into the operation, and on his entire journey, from diagnosis to the present.
“I had a little pimple under my skin, you scratch at it and it turned out it was a BCC,” he explained. “SCC (squamous cell carcinoma) is the most deadly thing you can get on your chin apart from a pimple.
“Over time it rotted my chin and it was hideous. They said it was really aggressive and it was about to eat away the rest of my face and eventually get to my brain and I’d be brown bread.
“Another aggressive SCC started growing in a crater that was created when they removed one minor one and it was heading towards my brain. There’s the skin, then there’s the scalp, then there’s your brain. What this was doing was very aggressive and it was starting to go through what’s left of my meniscus.”
At one stage, he compared his surgery to John Farnham's - the singer underwent a similar surgery of 11 and a half hours to remove a cancerous mouth tumour last year.
'I don't think his was as radical as mine,” John mused, “because I had all of my lower jaw removed along with the teeth.”
“Hopefully John will get through this with as little angst as possible,” he said of Farnham’s experience, “and he’s going to need all the support he can get. I know his family is very loving and they’re all going to gather around him.”
John has maintained a positive approach throughout his fight, as he demonstrated in 2020 after surgery when he tweeted his thanks, and that his “journey towards becoming George Clooney's stunt double for all his love scenes … continued today at Linacre Private Hospital.”
In another 2020 update posted to Facebook, John continued his good humour, writing, “sufficed to say, there’ll be more excavation work going on around my face tomorrow than the Westgate Tunnel Project!”
While the nature of John’s cancer is aggressive, and the surgeries long and difficult, John has remained optimistic, and considers himself to be “the luckiest person on earth.”
“Adversity,” as he told You Cannot Be Serious hosts Sam Newman and Don Scott, “doesn’t matter how important or smart you think you are, everyone has some sort of adversity in their life.”
Images: Facebook