Adele Horin’s heartbreaking cancer blog post

POPULAR blogger and award-winning ex-journalist Adele Horin has revealed that her lung cancer has “raged back” and her “prognosis is poor”.

POPULAR blogger and award-winning ex-Fairfax journalist Adele Horin has revealed that her lung cancer has “raged back” and her “prognosis is poor”.

In a blog post on her ‘Coming of Age’ website, Horin, 64, wrote “my luck has run out. I’m not going to be one of those feisty octogenarians I so admired.”

Horin’s cancer was first detected in 2014 and has returned despite being treated with surgery and chemotherapy.

About 11,270 people were diagnosed with lung cancer in Australia in 2012, making it the fifth most common cancer in the country.

It is most commonly diagnosed in people aged 60 years and older and tobacco smoking is a major risk factor associated with the cancer.

“I want to say it’s unfair. I never smoked; I’ve been too much the ‘good girl’ all my life,” Horan wrote.

“I hope for miracles and I look at Clive James with hope.”

Poet, cultural critic and novelist James stated he was “on limited time” when he was diagnosed with leukaemia in 2010. Despite the negative prognosis, James is still alive.

Horin started her career as a cadet journalist at the West Australian newspaper in the ‘60s.

“I was lucky being one of the 10 per cent or so in the 60s who went to university,” she wrote on her blog.

Adele Horin, in 2001.

“But more than that, I also was accepted as a cadet journalist on the West Australian newspaper. These days you need a PhD, a series of unpaid internships and other outrageous requirements. It was hard in my day, too. But I believe what impressed them was I’d been editor of the school newspaper and my incredible coup in nabbing JT and the Jazzmen, the hottest group in Perth at the time, to play at the school ball.”

After 18 years in journalism Horin retired in 2012 as a columnist and journalist for the Sydney Morning Herald. During her time in journalism she acted as a correspondent in New York, Washington and London and received a Walkley Award and the Australian Human Rights Commission media award.

A prolific and polarising writer on social issues, she was described as the paper’s “resident feminist”.

Throughout the post, Horin outlines all the ways in which she’s been lucky in her life, giving gratitude for her education, her partner, her children and her career.

“Right now dear readers, I’m too sick to continue to write the blog,” Horin concludes.

“Maybe I will be able to restart it again. But if not, I want you to know what a privilege it has been to be part of such a thoughtful community. I valued your comments and your following. You’ll still be able to access my writing and readers’ comments from the past two and a half years at the same web address.

Growing older is a mixture of good and bad.

May you have the good luck to enjoy a vibrant and engaged long life.”

After posting the piece on her website, Adele Horin was trending on Twitter in Sydney.

In the same situation may we all show the same courage, dignity & insight as my dear friend @AdeleHorin https://t.co/l01kJOY3Xq

— Wendy Bacon (@Wendy_Bacon) November 15, 2015

Adele Horin, a very fine journalist and a very good person, has cancer. https://t.co/ZsOfTbr8AQ

— Mike Carlton (@MikeCarlton01) November 15, 2015

Originally published as Adele Horin’s heartbreaking cancer blog post