‘Toughest year of my life’: Katrina Blowers on the 12 months that nearly broke her
In an exclusive interview, Katrina Blowers opens up on the toughest year of her life where she lost her beloved mum and was ‘blindsided’ by the end of her engagement.
Entertainment
Don't miss out on the headlines from Entertainment. Followed categories will be added to My News.
It’s not about what happens to you in life, it’s how you choose to respond.
That’s the mantra 7News Queensland presenter and chief reporter Katrina Blowers says to herself when times are tough.
And it’s fair to say that last year she needed to repeat it again and again.
In May 2024, Blowers lost her beloved mum, Elizabeth Barnes, to motor neurone disease and weeks after her mother’s passing, Blowers’ engagement to her then partner of three years, Adam Yates, ended abruptly.
“It has definitely been the toughest year of my life,” Blowers says.
“It nearly broke me, I’m not going to sugar-coat that.
“I had to come to terms with the loss of my mother, but also the loss of a future that I had to recalibrate. It was really tough thinking my life isn’t going to turn out the way that I hoped it would.
“It affected my mental health in a way that was more challenging than I’ve ever had to deal with.”
But Blowers says it was her mum who taught her the mantra that kept her going – even as Elizabeth’s own life was slipping away.
“We just took it for granted that Mum would live forever,” says Blowers, who was born in Townsville and later lived in Canberra and Sydney before settling in Brisbane in 2011.
“We were especially close because my dad left when I was six months old and so it was my mum and I against the world … we were a little dynamic duo.
“She had to be a single mum at a time when that was really frowned upon, so she’s really instilled in me the importance of being independent and being a strong woman.”
Elizabeth later partnered with Brian Blowers, and “he’s the only father I have ever known”.
Elizabeth and Brian had a son, Ben, together and remained in a relationship for about 16 years. Blowers says they are all still incredibly close, especially so since Elizabeth’s death.
She first noticed her mum, a former midwife and nurse, slurring her words when they talked on the phone. Then she and Ben saw Elizabeth had a limp when they visited
her in Toowoomba for her 70th birthday celebrations.
Five months later, in January 2023, they convinced Elizabeth to see a doctor.
“She was so resistant to it and, in hindsight, I think it’s because she already knew because she had nursed people with MND. She had tried to mask her symptoms, I think, for quite a while.”
In May, 2023, the doctors delivered the gut-wrenching diagnosis.
“It had never even occurred to me that it would be MND, I just never thought it could be,” Blowers says.
“It was quite brutal … He (the doctor) said: ‘Elizabeth, this is the end of your story, you need to go and get your affairs in order.’
“MND is meant to be rare enough, my mum had an even rarer type which came with a diagnosis of frontotemporal dementia, which is the same kind of dementia that Bruce Willis has.”
Elizabeth was, Blowers says, a larger-than-life, confident and loveable woman but over the next year, the incurable disease slowly diminished her world.
“I’d visit her weekly or fortnightly as much as I could and every time you’re driving through the Lockyer Valley up to Toowoomba, you’d know there would be another deterioration or another thing you’d have to brace to see. Every time there was something more to process.”
Elizabeth lost the ability to speak and swallow first, then mobility of her lower body, but she could still use her hands.
“I bought her a whiteboard early on and she would write her responses on it,” Blowers says.
“We’d just talk about her day and how she was feeling, she would tell me about books, she was a prolific reader. She was so bright.”
It was a painful and long goodbye but Blowers found comfort in knowing her mum’s spirit remained unbroken.
Elizabeth spent her remaining time at home with her partner of 13 years, Glenn, taking care of her and liked to sit and watch the wallabies and kookaburras in their back yard.
Her health deteriorated quickly after she developed pneumonia and on May 4, 2024, at the age of 71, Elizabeth passed away in hospital, holding her daughter’s hand. Blowers pauses, her eyes filling with tears as she relives this moment.
“One of the things about watching somebody die over a period of time is you do get the opportunity to have those conversations and say all of the things you really wish you could say,” she says softly, wiping away tears.
“But I knew that there was one thing I hadn’t said and that was giving her permission to go.
“It had been a number of days of her being unconscious, and I was left in the room alone with her, and I told her that she could stop fighting and that she could go without worrying that we weren’t going to be OK … I told her that it was OK to let go.
“I held her hand, she opened her eyes and she looked at me, and she closed her eyes, and let out one last breath with a rattle at the end and she passed away.
“I felt really privileged to have been able to tell her exactly what she needed to hear to let go.
“It was the most powerful experience of my whole life.”
Standing by Blowers providing her comfort and support was Yates, which made it even more devastating for Blowers when their relationship ended without warning weeks after Elizabeth died.
Blowers met Yates, a former Surfing Queensland CEO, in 2021 through a mutual friend.
They were happy, and falling madly in love as they navigated their lives between the Gold Coast, where Yates was based, and Brisbane, where Blowers lives.
Blowers was excited for her next love story after her 13-year marriage to Tom, with whom she shares children Zahra, 17, and Jed, 14, ended in divorce in 2019. They were together for nearly 20 years and things ended amicably, she says, with the pair remaining great friends and
co-parents, so she felt ready for a new beginning.
In 2023, Yates orchestrated an elaborate surprise proposal while the couple was on holiday in the Maldives to celebrate his 40th birthday.
He organised the pool of their villa to be filled with rose petals – which had to be shipped in from India – and floating in the middle was a wooden sign that read, “Will you marry me?”
At the time, Blowers described it as one of the most special moments of her life. She cringes now as she thinks about it.
“I was so public in celebrating that relationship because I was happy and I thought that was it,” she says.
“So in terms of sharing my engagement, it was really happy news and I had viewers write in to me and send me cards and flowers and they were excited too.”
But less than a year after Yates proposed, while Blowers was grieving the death of her mother, their relationship began to unravel.
“He was by my side in hospital but then shortly after the funeral, that’s when it all kind of fell apart,” Blowers says.
“There were things I couldn’t come back from and I chose to end the engagement. I was completely shocked, it was really tough.”
Blowers was planning their wedding and had bought her dress which, she says, is still hanging in her wardrobe at work (but which she plans to donate to charity).
“I thought it (the relationship) was great … I thought I was in what was a fairytale relationship and I was pretty blindsided,” she says.
“We’d gone back and forth on when we were going to get married and whether we would fast track it so mum could be there but because mum’s deterioration was so rapid, having to pull off a wedding in the middle of that would have been too much.”
In the months following their break-up, Yates resigned as Surfing Queensland’s CEO.
“Adam resigned from his position as CEO of Surfing Queensland mid-last year,” says a spokesperson for the government-funded organisation, which Yates was the head of since 2014.
“Surfing Queensland does not comment on individual personnel matters.”
Meanwhile, Blowers was navigating some of the most difficult days of her life.
She’d been tested before, including when she had a panic attack on-air in 2020 during the period of her divorce, but nothing compared to the all-consuming force of grief.
“I was not in a good way. I wasn’t sleeping. I wasn’t eating. I was struggling,” she says. “I had to take time off work, my ex-husband had to take care of the kids for a bit, I saw a psychologist and … I went and saw a hypnotherapist and that really helped.
“It’s been hard because I’ve had a lot of questions, people messaging me on social media or asking me in the street even what happened or noticing that I’m not wearing my engagement ring on the news, or noticing I’ve deleted all the pictures on my Instagram and I haven’t really known what to say because I haven’t known how to articulate it.”
It was the support of her friends and family, regular therapy and exercise, Blowers says, that helped her piece her heart and confidence back together.
“You can’t do it all on your own, I’ve really leaned into my female friends,” she says. “It’s going back to basics, I’ve had to do some really big soul-searching over the last year.
“It’s not falling into that trap of thinking I’m a failure, I should be at a different point in my life than I am or I’m unlucky in love, all of which are narratives that are not helpful but also not true.
“I really believe in love, I don’t want to be cynical about it. I still think that I would love to get married one day and I still hope to meet my person.”
There’s no anger or bitterness, it serves her no purpose, she says. Instead, here is a woman with a quiet, fierce resolve who chose to rise and move forward, just as her mum would have wanted.
“The grief of my mum dying, obviously being so close to the grief of my relationship ending, was a lot to process but I drew so much inspiration and courage from my mum who spent that year of her life after she’d been diagnosed just digging deeper than I had ever seen anyone dig deep,” she says.
“I knew that borrowing some of the courage from my mum was going to get me through some of those tough times.
“My mum was this eternal optimist … so whenever I have a wobbly moment, I truly do think of my mum.”
Elizabeth has always been a guidingforce for Blowers. She embraced Blowers’ early dreams of one day being on TV, even as a little girl. “Mum always had such a huge belief in me, that I could do whatever I wanted,” she says. And what she wanted, from the age of seven, was to be a journalist after she asked her mum what was the job of the lady on the television.
“She said it was a journalist and you got to travel all around the world and ask people whatever you wanted to ask them, and I was like, that’s it … that’s the job for me,” Blowers says.
She went on to study communications majoring in broadcast journalism at university before securing her first job at what was then Ten Capital News in Canberra at the age of 21. After being told she looked “too young” for television, she switched to radio and worked at Nova Sydney, where she was part of the
number one breakfast show at the time alongside comedians Merrick Watts and Tim Ross, known as Merrick and Rosso. But Blowers had “unfinished business” in the world of news.
After a year off to travel with her then husband, Tom, where she wrote a book (Tuning Out: My Quarter-life Crisis), she made her way back to television.
Across her extensive 25-year career as a journalist, she’s worked at the ABC where she read the news on Insiders, co-hosted Channel 9’s now defunct show This Afternoon alongside Mark Ferguson and Andrew Daddo, and in 2011 moved to Brisbane to join 7News Queensland.
In 2020, Blowers took over from Kay McGrath to present the weekend news, then moved to reading the 4pm weekday news in 2024, and is now co-hosting the 6pm nightly news with Max Futcher while Sarah Greenhalgh is on maternity leave.
Yet of all the stories she’s told across her career, she never imagined she’d be telling her own.
But here, on a sunny winter morning at a cafe on James St in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley, Blowers is grateful to be sharing it from a far happier place.
“A year on, I can happily say I’ve well and truly moved on from that break-up curveball,” she says.
“There’s been a lot of self-reflection and in hindsight I’ve definitely gained a lot more than I lost. I’ve actually never felt more content and at peace in my personal life than I do now.
“I’m also the fittest and strongest I’ve ever been, which feels amazing.”
Blowers works out with a personal trainer twice a week and a few months ago started running in honour of her mum.
She will run her first half marathon at this weekend’s Gold Coast Marathon where she’s raising funds and awareness for MND.
“I picked this as a challenge because I hate running, and I wanted to do something that would be really, really hard physically because my mum was very quickly stripped of her ability to do most physical things,” she says.
Blowers says it’s also been a meaningful way to channel her grief.
“I recently read that ‘grief is just love with no place to go’ and I feel like by honouring my mum in this way, running a half marathon and fundraising for MND, I’m giving it a place to go.”
A year on, she can feel the shift.
She’s stronger now, more resilient and grounded in a deeper sense of perspective.
“Losing a parent changes you, as does watching a loved one needlessly suffer,” she says. “It has transformed my outlook on the preciousness of life and how we can’t take anything for granted. Don’t put things off. Don’t miss an opportunity to tell people you love them.”
She pauses, glancing down at the rings on her hands, as she has done often throughout our conversation. On her left hand, she wears a garnet ring that belonged to her mother and on her right is a delicate gold heart.
They remind her of what can never be lost. Her mother’s love and strength and, above all, her mother’s legacy to never let the light stop shining.
“Mum’s greatest gift was instilling in me the sense anything is possible,” Blowers says. “She had such an unwavering belief in my ability and in the power of a positive mindset and hard work.
“She might be gone but her belief in me lives on in my heart. I’ll be drawing upon that and thinking of her every kilometre until I cross the finish line.”
Originally published as ‘Toughest year of my life’: Katrina Blowers on the 12 months that nearly broke her
The world-famous Central Park is in which city?
The Chase Australia’s official Shark, Brydon Coverdale, has created a new daily quiz challenge. Test yourself.
Mexico’s ‘Day of the Dead’ holiday occurs during which month?
The Chase Australia’s official Shark, Brydon Coverdale, has created a new daily quiz challenge. Test yourself.