# IMPERFIX: Kate Langbroek on The Risks of Love

An episode of [The Imperfects](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1476501557), 13 Mar 2024, 16 min.

Audio: https://enrichment.soundstack.com/4vjqq8/episode.flightcast.com/w1t0dmc2fu19ikv5zglwii2m.mp3

Kate Langbroek, in our humble opinion, is a very special person. We absolutely love her, and we’re clearly not alone. Kate, has experienced decades of success on Australian TV and radio - whether it was every Wednesday night on The Panel; with her mate Hughesy on the radio; or in countless podcasts, and radio shows since. On this episode of The Imperfix, we revisit, when in 2022, Kate generously shared with us what it was like when her eldest son Lewis was diagnosed with Leukaemia, and how it impacted her life and her family - then and now. To hear the full episode with Kate, follow this link https://apple.co/4fy5o84 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

## Transcript

[0:00] My name's George, and I edit The Imperfects.
[0:02] I grew up on Ngunnawal country, studied on Bundjalung country, and am now living and working on Wurundjeri country.
[0:08] On behalf of The Imperfects, we acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast was recorded, and we extend our respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
[0:20] The rich storytelling history of the world's oldest living culture is what we proudly pay homage to when we share stories on The Imperfects.
[0:28] Hi there.
[0:30] I'm like the imperfect.
[0:32] Oh, yeah, sort of.
[0:33] But I'm a quick fix.
[0:33] Yeah, if you're in a hurry or something.
[0:35] I'm a helpful mix of archival tips from episodes past.
[0:38] You can listen to me fast.
[0:40] Da-da-da-da-da.
[0:41] Get ready for this.
[0:42] Yeah, why not?
[0:42] It won't take long.
[0:43] I'm an episode of the imperfect.
[0:46] Hello, it's Ryan here from The Imperfects, another week of The Imperfects.
[0:52] So each week, one of us brings a different clip that we'd like to play from a past episode in this week.
[0:56] Obviously, if you've read the title, this is a clip from Kate Langbrook's episode.
[1:01] And I've known Kate for a long time, and I just love Kate as a person.
[1:07] so much for me personally.
[1:09] I think for a lot of people, she's such like a source of light and joy in people's life.
[1:17] She doesn't take life too seriously, which is what makes this chat about her son, Lewis's leukemia battle really interesting.
[1:27] And I found it really helpful.
[1:28] She was
[1:29] forced to face something very serious in her life.
[1:34] And it's quite inspiring to hear how she went about it and how she took it on.
[1:40] I mean, there's one quote in this particular clip where she said, if you live long enough, life is going to kick you where it's really going to hurt.
[1:50] And then she goes on to say that loving someone is where you take all the risks.
[1:54] This is like obviously a story about her family's adversity and like a really challenging time.
[1:59] But even though it's about leukemia, it's about cancer of her son, I think you can probably apply a lot of what she talks about in this episode to any challenge or adversity that you're going through.
[2:11] So hope you enjoy this.
[2:13] I hope you get something out of it.
[2:14] If you're listening, Kate, I love you.
[2:16] Seems like a public way to say that.
[2:18] Should have just texted you, but I love you very
[2:24] coffee.
[2:25] Let me know.
[2:26] This episode with Kate Langbrook is available as a full episode, of course, and you can listen to it.
[2:30] And there's a link in the show notes like every week on The Imperfects.
[2:39] Are you happy to talk about?
[2:41] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[2:42] Well, you know, I always like to kind of preface it.
[2:47] Well, not always.
[2:47] I don't talk about it that often really.
[2:49] But how lucky I am to be able to talk about it.
[2:53] We talk about him now that he's 18 and he's 6'2".
[2:56] Because I'm very...
[3:01] aware of the parents who we were at the children's cancer, in the children's cancer ward with, who can't have this conversation about their children.
[3:13] So I'm always just very, we had a good outcome, you know.
[3:18] We're not done.
[3:19] It's not done, you know.
[3:20] There's...
[3:21] a cloud over him.
[3:23] But I think we know what the cloud is.
[3:26] Everyone's got a cloud over them.
[3:27] Most of us just don't see the cloud.
[3:29] We know what his cloud is.
[3:32] But so in 2009, Yanni was five months old.
[3:38] He was born in July.
[3:39] We had four children under six.
[3:43] And Lewis was at prep, in prep, and he'd been sick for a couple of weeks and,
[3:51] I'm like just off.
[3:53] And he went to a family party with all his cousins.
[3:58] And my mother-in-law said, I don't like it.
[4:02] He couldn't even play with the other kids.
[4:03] He just had to lie down.
[4:05] We had to carry him onto the couch.
[4:08] And I said, well, I've been to the doctor twice and they gave me antibiotics.
[4:12] This doctor I'd been going to the whole time I'd been in Melbourne.
[4:15] And Marie said, I'm going to take him.
[4:19] And I said, oh, that'd be good.
[4:21] So she took him and she had a fight with the doctor and the doctor said, because she was going to give us more antibiotics, and the doctor said, if you don't like what I'm saying, you can take him to the children's hospital.
[4:31] And Marie said, I will.
[4:33] And that night we were in the children's cancer centre and he had leukaemia.
[4:37] And it was... How did you find out then?
[4:41] So your mother-in-law just called you and...
[4:43] Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
[4:45] Peter went with her to the hospital.
[4:47] Did you have any feeling that it could be something really bad or... No, but Marie said as soon as they saw the doctor's face in emergency, she said his face was terrible.
[4:59] Oh, God.
[5:00] She knew, she knew.
[5:01] She said when she saw his face...
[5:03] So were you called into the hospital?
[5:04] Yeah, I went into the hospital.
[5:07] We were all in the hospital that night.
[5:09] And the first night, I mean, it's so surreal, obviously.
[5:15] But the first night, they make such beautiful provisions for families as much as they can in at the hospital now.
[5:23] that there was, and this was at the old Children's Hospital in Melbourne, there was a room for parents whose children had just been diagnosed so you could actually sleep there.
[5:31] It just had like a double bed in it.
[5:35] Annie Peacock from Crown had donated like toiletries and there were like, so there were crown slippers and crown bathrobes in there.
[5:42] And not that you probably slept much, but you were just so exhausted.
[5:46] So you could be near your child.
[5:47] And Peter and I were like, oh, this is so good.
[5:50] And like on the third day, they said to us, you know what, you can't keep staying here.
[5:54] We were like, oh, of course we can't.
[5:57] But we were just like- Getting your mail redirected.
[5:59] Yeah, we were just, you know, it's hard to know-
[6:05] what to do because when your child is sick, you're with your child.
[6:09] And then we had to, but of course we had three other children.
[6:12] And it had happened in the time of year when I was on holidays and the kids were on holidays.
[6:19] Well, the kids' life was a holiday.
[6:21] They weren't little kids.
[6:22] But so we had this like six weeks to embark on the start of his treatment and to kind of get a sense of,
[6:36] how things were going to progress.
[6:39] So that when it came time to go back to work, which the hospital was really insistent about, they were like, you must live a normal life.
[6:46] They said that all the time to us.
[6:48] And we were like, how can anything ever be normal again?
[6:53] Like, just so...
[6:56] Anyway, so I went back to work and then Peter and I and Peter went back to work.
[7:01] We were kind of on the basis that, and we've been like that ever since really.
[7:07] I mean, we were probably like that when we started having children that we were always like, let's try and do this.
[7:12] Let's go here for the weekend.
[7:13] Let's go to the snow.
[7:14] Let's whatever.
[7:15] If it doesn't work, we'll come back.
[7:17] So that's how we were with cancer.
[7:20] Let's try and see what we can do.
[7:22] Let's...
[7:24] try and go back to work.
[7:26] My daughter had to start school even because we'd been having that debate about whether she should start.
[7:33] She was only – she was the day – two days before the cutoff.
[7:36] So she was the youngest by ages.
[7:38] And because people keep their kids back as well, some kids were like over a year older than her.
[7:44] So she had to start school, which was not great for her in retrospect.
[7:48] Mm-hmm.
[7:50] But we were just like, this whole family's got to get the show on the road.
[7:54] Like, we've got four years of cancer treatment in front of us.
[7:58] So, and the first year was terrible, like just terrible.
[8:03] And everything that we'd been told didn't happen.
[8:06] Not really anyone's fault, but they were like, oh, children tolerate chemotherapy much better than adults.
[8:13] And Lewis was just constantly sick and vomiting and then it turned out he had an infection and, oh, it was just – and he went blind in one eye and they thought he'd relapsed and I write about that in the book and it was – Yeah, I've actually – can I actually read that?
[8:30] Yeah, you can.
[8:30] Yeah, because I just – that bit there just –
[8:33] I tried to take each fear-filled, leaden step evenly.
[8:36] Each stroke of his little bald head with my hand was calm and reassuring.
[8:40] Every word I spoke, I acted quietly and lightly to make sure I would not betray to my child the quivering fear inside me.
[8:47] I made little jokes, and his father and I smoothed his pyjamas, and we lifted his tiny body onto his hospital bed.
[8:54] And everything was white and bright and clean and surgical, except for his fluffy blanket we had brought from home.
[9:00] And I smiled and murmured and comforted my boy.
[9:03] And the kindly surgeon said to me very gently, I'll take good care of him, I promise.
[9:07] And I could only whisper, thank you.
[9:09] And I had to turn away because inside I was fluttering and weak like a captured, wild, dying thing.
[9:17] How is it hearing your own words?
[9:18] I mean, that description of it, I imagine like any parent who reads this will automatically put themselves in your shoes.
[9:25] And my first thing is, I don't know how I could cope.
[9:28] People said that to us a lot, really.
[9:31] But you just do, don't you?
[9:32] Because who else is going to cope for you?
[9:35] Who else is going to cope for your child if you don't cope?
[9:38] You just have to.
[9:41] I mean, I guess there are people who can't and don't and
[9:44] But I think if you live long enough, life is just going to kick you somewhere where it's really going to hurt.
[9:55] And the fact that it hurts is because you don't know where the kick's going to come from.
[10:02] And if you love people, that is where the worst pain is going to come from because loving someone is where you take all the risks.
[10:12] And that was our test of life, I guess.
[10:18] Yeah.
[10:19] Is there a point that you look back on in that four years where you remember thinking it can't get worse than this?
[10:26] Was there a point where you just felt like you're at absolute rock bottom at all?
[10:30] Or does it feel like the whole thing, that whole four years was just like that?
[10:35] The first, I'm going to say, 18 months just felt like we were just on an inclinator that was just taking us on a descent into worse, worse, worse, worse.
[10:47] And the worst thing, the worst moment was really when Lewis went blind in his eye.
[10:52] And once again, he was at Marie's, who was at my mother-in-law's house in Sunshine, because he couldn't come home because his immunity had been blanked.
[11:02] from his lumbar punctures that he would have.
[11:05] And we had three unimmunised babies at home, the greatest risk to his immunity.
[11:14] And...
[11:16] So he had to stay, he would often stay with Marie.
[11:19] And Marie's a former school teacher.
[11:21] And so she had her little, the sanatorium, we'd call it the back room that Peter had had when he lived at home.
[11:26] And she had all his school lessons up there.
[11:29] And anyway, and then we were, I was going over and we would go over and see him every day.
[11:35] And we were going over there one day and Marie said, he's gone blind in his eye.
[11:41] I knew as soon as I heard that, I said, I'll meet you in at the hospital.
[11:45] So instead of going to Sunshine, we met in at the hospital.
[11:49] And then they, obviously, they all thought it was relapse because the leukaemia he had lives in the lining around the brain, obviously the optic nerves, the spine, and in boys in the testes, that's why the treatment's longer than it is for girls.
[12:07] And they all thought he'd relapsed.
[12:11] Well, they didn't tell us that immediately, but you can tell.
[12:14] You get pretty good at reading the nonverbal cues at the children's hospital, you know.
[12:21] So they had to find a surgeon who'd do a biopsy on his eye, and it was hard to find someone because he was a child because he was so little.
[12:27] Yeah.
[12:29] and then there was a surgeon who was coming down from Sydney who did it, who was that beautiful surgeon.
[12:34] And then we had to wait while we got the biopsy results, and that was just the most terrible time.
[12:40] I remember he was having the operation at the Irony Hospital in East Melbourne.
[12:48] Yes.
[12:49] And there's that big, beautiful church there.
[12:51] Is it St. Patrick's Cathedral?
[12:53] Yes, it is.
[12:55] And we were sent out of the hospital while Lewis was having the operation.
[12:58] So when he went under, they went, you can come back in an hour or whatever.
[13:03] And so we were just like, where do we go?
[13:07] What do we do?
[13:08] And we tried to go into the church.
[13:10] I said to Peter, let's go into the church and light a candle.
[13:14] We couldn't even work out how to get into the church.
[13:17] It was just like such an imposing kind of...
[13:21] And that's probably a metaphor for churches, isn't it?
[13:24] Yeah.
[13:26] That we couldn't work out how to get in there.
[13:28] It was just terrible.
[13:30] It was so terrible.
[13:32] And then we got the biopsy results on the Saturday morning.
[13:38] We were at home together and there was a French doctor, Dr. Francoise.
[13:44] Anyway, Dr. Francoise had sent the biopsy result off to...
[13:50] unbeknownst to our oncologist to another hospital rather than where they'd normally go.
[13:57] So they couldn't find the biopsy results in the system, but it was because they were at this other hospital.
[14:01] And she called us on the Saturday morning.
[14:04] And because we were talking about transplant at this point and we took the kids into tissue type to see if they were compatible and none of them were.
[14:12] And Peter was like, why did we have so many?
[14:15] Yeah.
[14:16] What was the point?
[14:18] Anyway, they were just so convinced he'd relapsed.
[14:21] And then we got the phone call from Dr. Francoise on the Saturday morning.
[14:26] And I took the phone.
[14:26] I went out onto the front porch because I'm like, I can't have the kids see me get this phone call because this will just be, you know.
[14:35] And it was her and she said, there's no trace of leukemic activity in the optic fluid.
[14:41] And I said, what?
[14:43] She said, there is no trace of leukemic cells.
[14:46] There are no leukemic cells.
[14:48] And I said, oh, can you say that again?
[14:50] And I got Peter.
[14:52] Peter was inside like standing the hallway.
[14:54] And I put her on speakerphone and she told us again.
[14:57] And we just like clung to each other.
[15:00] And we're like, yay, he's just blind.
[15:10] It was just amazing.
[15:12] It was amazing.
[15:13] It was a miracle.
[15:14] It was a miracle of the kind that we lived.

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