Marcella Zemanek was married to radio legend, Stan Zemanek for 30 years. Stan died from brain cancer in 2007.
The last words Stan said to me were, “have a good time!” How do I do that?
Now nearly five years later I still sometimes struggle with the finality of it. Stan thought he would live forever and that only Kryptonite would get him, but in the end we found that this wasn’t the case.
When Stan was diagnosed with a brain tumour after an MRI scan we knew he’d need an operation if he had any chance of survival. This led us to Dr Charlie Teo, one of Australia’s leading neurosurgeons who operated three days after we met him, it took another four days to find out that the tumour was malignant and a grade four glioma. The prognosis was not good.
Even when being dealt what would become a terminal sentence, Stan still wanted to help. His only question to Charlie was “now, what can I do to help you?”
Charlie Teo had already founded the Cure For Life Foundation by this stage, a foundation set up to raise much needed funds for brain cancer research to find a cure. Why? Because brain cancer is the biggest killer of Australians under thirty-nine, it takes more women under thirty five’s lives than any other cancer and it is the biggest cancer killer of children. Most patients diagnosed with brain cancer don’t survive beyond two years. Stan survived fifteen months.
I spent half my life with Stan, we started off as friends, then as a couple and finally as husband and wife. When he left us at 2.45am on July 12, 2007, I felt a pain in my heart that was unbearable.