Channel 10 presenter Barry Du Bois has opened up in a raw and heartbreaking letter about his ongoing battle with cancer, revealing the devastating moment he was told he had just months to live.
In a deeply personal essay for The Gold Coast Bulletin, the father of two recalled the chilling day a doctor delivered a prognosis that shattered his world: “I had three months to live.”
“I was sitting in a cold, unfamiliar consult room at the hospital, my wife’s hand holding mine … then a doctor who had known me for only a few hours looked me in the eye and told me I had three months to live,” Du Bois wrote.
Du Bois was first diagnosed in 2010 with solitary plasmacytoma, a rare and aggressive form of blood cancer. While he survived that initial battle, the disease returned in 2017 – this time as multiple myeloma, an incurable cancer that attacks the immune system and bone marrow.
Since then, the 63-year-old Living Room star has fought on, defying the odds with remarkable strength and grace. But as he revealed in the letter, his path has been anything but easy.
His strength, he said, was forged through years of pain: breaking his back in a 14-metre fall, a gruelling and heartbreaking IVF journey with his wife Leonie that ended in miscarriage, and her own cervical cancer diagnosis just weeks later.
“When I got my diagnosis – incurable cancer, three months to live – I didn’t fall apart,” he wrote. “I knew that from leaning into the previous adversities of life I had the resilience to give the fight of my life.”
Still, Du Bois admitted there was a time he came perilously close to giving up. After Leonie’s miscarriage and illness, the darkness nearly swallowed him. “I avoided conversation and started a continual negative conversation with myself that took me into the darkness … depression is a lonely state and I refused to share my pain. I saw it as a weakness.”
In the end, it was his family that pulled him back and helped him find purpose again. Since then, Du Bois has become a powerful voice for others fighting chronic illness and mental health struggles, using his platform to share candid updates on life, treatment and the importance of hope.
“I was overwhelmed with fear, uncertainty and the unknown,” he said of that early diagnosis. “But through it all, I realised something that I feel is why I am here today: It wasn’t going to be cancer that defined me but the way I choose to approach it.”
From his early TV days on The Renovators in 2011 to his long-running role on The Living Room alongside Amanda Keller, Miguel Maestre and Dr Chris Brown, Du Bois has become a familiar and much-loved face on Australian screens. But behind the smiles and strength lies a story of extraordinary pain and courage.
His fight continues. And so too does his mission: to live fully, love deeply, and face each day not with fear, but with determination.
Images: Instagram
