Viewers have watched him navigate a somewhat difficult relationship with his bride, Ning. But Mark’s difficulties on Married At First Sight are nothing compared to what he’s dealt with in his personal life during the last year.
Speaking to 9Honey, the 42-year-old opens up about the horrific ordeal he and his family went through when his sister, Jane, went through brain surgery to remove a tumour in early 2018.
Despite Jane never being a person who ‘got sick,’ a serious of worrying health issues lead to her diagnosis.
“In October [2017] I was varying degrees of headaches,” Jane, 40, tells 9Honey Celebrity. “Sometimes it would require medication and other times it wouldn’t. But I would just continue on my daily life, because I have two young babies.
“In October, my period stopped,” Jane continues. “And then — going back to August — I had an 18-month-old and I’d stopped breastfeeding. And six months after stopping the breastfeeding, I started lactating again.”
Jane originally ignored these symptoms. The following February she was reminded that she was due for a Pap smear. After dropping her son to preschool, Jane actually booked an appointment because “the one thing I actually care about is Pap smears.”
Mark is extremely close to his sister’s Jane [left] and Lynne [right].
She told the doctor that her periods had stopped, which the doctor didn’t seem to think was too out of the ordinary. It was only when Jane mentioned that she was still lactating — despite stopping breastfeeding six months prior — that the doctor suggested she get an MRI.
“I was like, why would I need to go for an MRI?” Jane says. “Like, what is happening here? And that was the first time I heard the word ‘pituitary’.”
Jane nearly didn’t go through with the MRI, but luckily her husband persuaded her to go.
“He booked me in on the Friday, and then I was being told I had a 2.5cm tumour in my brain,” Jane recalls. “The funny part was I was so busy that I went to get the scan whilst I was at work, because I was like, I do not have time for this.
“I went back to work, and I said I won’t be back for some time.”
When Mark received the call from his sister to confirm her diagnosis, he was understandably devastated.
“Every time we seem to ring each other, it’s always about jobs, or something exciting that’s happening in our lives,” Mark says. “So Lynne [Mark’s older sister] and I just anticipated that she’d just received a promotion or something related to work, or there was something else happening in her life that was good. Then all of a sudden she dropped that on us, and Lynne automatically goes into panic mode and starts googling, and starts to try and figure out what she can do.
“It was a massive shock because — touch wood — prior to that, our family had never really experienced any kind of major illness or injury. We had sort of the normal stuff that people go through, but we hadn’t really experienced anything of that magnitude.”
When it came to surgery day, Mark was there to support Jane. “He’s strong, he’s resilient, even if he’s stressed he won’t let on,” Jane says of her big brother. It also helped that Mark “can make a joke about anything.”
In the end, “The surgery was four hours. And they pulled it out through my nose but there were some complications,” Jane explains. “I mean, the surgery was fine — I was drugged up — but the recovery was horrific. It was like I went to hell and back.”
Jane and her husband haven’t talked to their sons, who are aged two and four, about what happened to her.
“I’ve always been positive, but I feel like I’m really savouring all the time with the boys that I can,” Jane says. “I was sort of monitoring my cycles at the time because we were talking about a third [child], but obviously that’s not gonna happen now. So, it’s now just really precious time with family. I think Mark had agreed that we’ve all sort of just thought — it’s that cliché line — don’t take anything for granted anymore.”
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