Delta Goodrem has grown up in the public eye after starting out in small TV roles at the age of seven.
Then, she broke into the music industry at 15 and just three years later as she was starting to hit the top of the charts, while juggling a dream role on Aussie soap Neighbours, the star got life-altering news.
“My whole world changed,” she said on Begin Again with Davina McCall of her 2003 Hodgkin lymphoma diagnosis.
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However, Goodrem says it wasn’t entirely unexpected after having a nightmare she thought could be an eerie “premonition”, which left her telling friends and family “something bad’s going to happen to me”.
“I went to bed, and I woke up at 3:31am … I basically had a nightmare [in which] a sort of like a very dark figure came to me on a grave with a note,” she recalled.
The singer said on the British TV host’s podcast that she woke up from the nightmare “drenched” and terrified.
“I was head-to-toe [covered in sweat], like I’d been in the ocean, and I was frozen with fear, completely frozen,” she recalled.
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The dream left Goodrem warning others that something was about to come, even if she couldn’t put her finger on what that was.
During this time, she’d been to the doctors numerous times for symptoms that later lined up with her diagnosis but doctors at the time put it down to exhaustion.
The singer says she completely understands the missed diagnosis at the time, given she was working on the Neighbours set most days, in addition to making music and flying to the UK or US for weekends to promote singles.
After she found a lump on her neck that was getting bigger, her mum and product manager booked her an appointment at Sydney’s St Vincent’s Hospital.
Just hours after the doctor conducted a biopsy of the lump, the singer was being prepped for surgery.
Hearing the words “cancer” for the first time left her “just shaking”, as she tried to comprehend it all as an 18-year-old.
“I just felt trapped, like an animal in a corner where there’s nowhere to go and you just start shaking,” she recalled.
Goodrem says while the mass was in her neck the cells had “gone for a little ride around town in the body”, which left her undergoing radiation and chemotherapy as part of her treatment.
Elton John was among the celebrity well-wishers during that time, with the music icon calling her on the day of her first chemo session, resulting in a song of thanks in 2021, titled Dear Elton.
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The singer also reflected on attending the ARIA Awards in 2003, while undergoing treatment, with a nurse backstage for her throughout the show.
That year she won her first and long-dreamed of trophies, wearing a pink Lisa Ho dress with a pixie cut blonde wig, having just gone bald.
“It was my big night of very gratefully collecting these beautiful statues that I’d dreamed about all my life,” she said of the Sydney Superdome event.
“It wasn’t exactly how I imagined it but what depth.”
But it wasn’t all difficult moments the pair talked about.
The duo also spoke about Goodrem’s first meeting with her now husband, Matthew Copley, when he came in to play guitar for her in 2016.
The singer said one of her first thoughts was, “Oh, he’s a very good looking guitarist, isn’t he?!”
“We became friends first, without a doubt friendship first,” she added, noting it meant the pair were always confused about how long they’d been together.
Goodrem and Copley tied the knot in Malta in June, the same city they got engaged in back in September 2023.
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