Gerry’s most important role yet

No director, no support crew backstage, no stand-in and no clue what each new act will demand as it unfolds.

All for an audience of just three.

Gerry Oman has it all.

A wife, Amanda, who loves him very much, and two daughters, Ruby, 17, and Lulu, 14, who adore him.

He even has another woman, his stage wife Ivy Jensen, who is nearly always on hand when auditions begin for the next Echuca Moama Theatre Company production – and who generally ends up in a role where she bullies him around (interspersed with the occasional romantic scene to keep the sparks flying upward).

On November 13, Gerry’s thespian-self reached new heights, receiving his first sought-after Georgy (in partnership with stage wife Ivy). These prestigious awards are open to theatre groups across the Goulburn Valley.

Still in character, when their names were called out, the ‘theatre company couple’ stormed the stage, completing their appearance with a brief reprise of their dance scene from their award-winning performance in the company’s first post-COVID show.

But it wasn’t the Gerry of old, no real spring in his step, and he took no active part in the dance cameo.

Those closest to the Omans knew the effort it took Gerry to make the late afternoon drive to Mooroopna and the awards night – let alone climbing a small set of stairs and crossing a wide stage – and back.

Yes, Gerry has it all.

He also has cancer.

The diagnosis arrived on September 29; the prognosis was delivered on November 8.

It’s not just any cancer, Gerry has stage four, metastatic melanoma – with tumours in his spine, his brain, his liver and it has been detected, by his PET scan, in his muscles, lungs and thigh.

A tag-team assessment by neurologists, oncologists and spinal experts ruled out surgery, especially with the tumours at the base of his spine that had become so invasive. The doctors and their advisers concluded they would have to come up with something more viable.

And it’s called immunotherapy.

The Australian Cancer Council says immunotherapy is a treatment using the body’s own immune system to fight cancer. There are several types of immunotherapy and each works differently. Checkpoint inhibitors remove barriers that stop the immune system from finding and attacking cancer. Other types stimulate the immune system to help it work better against cancer.

For Gerry, life right now is not that clinically cut and dried.

“I guess in a lot of ways my life since September has been a bit of a blur, in and out of hospital, in and out of tests, and hearing a lot of things from doctors I didn’t necessarily catch, or understand,” Gerry said.

“Fortunately I get a lot of reports to read, and Amanda writes down a lot of stuff when we are talking to the doctors; I have kind of been reduced to a Medicare number and mountain of paperwork about tests.

“I think it started with a bad back, I had this pain on and off for about a year – I thought I had maybe pinched a nerve badly, maybe even copped a slipped disc.

“I went to the doctor and he ordered an MRI – which was a four-week wait – and when he saw it, he sent me immediately to emergency at the hospital.”

And that’s where Gerry’s happy little family life in a small regional town started to spin way out of his control, to blur.

Straight away the hospital wanted him immediately flown down to Melbourne, but the weather was so foul he ended up in the back of an ambulance for the long haul south, where the endless round of tests began and where normal people get frighteningly lost in a torrent of Latin as doctors poke, prod and probe before standing back to mutter amongst themselves.

He heard the disease had been found up and down his spine and in his brain – in the right hemisphere and across the top, where its size is, amongst other things, squeezing his optic nerves and impacting his vision.

There’s no hiding from this reality, no amount of greasepaint and fancy wardrobe is going to transport Gerry to some safe, make-believe world.

But like a real trouper, Gerry knows the show must go on.

And he is playing this role for Amanda, Ruby and Lulu, his raison d'être.

Gerry has been a stalwart of the stage with Echuca Moama Theatre Company since he followed then eight-year-old Ruby to the company’s Simmie St shed and discovered a bunch of amateur theatre freaks – “but my kind of freaks”.

Roped into the production of Li’l Abner, he had found his niche and couldn’t get enough. And has not missed a show since.

Now his most pressing schedule is not missing a doctor’s appointment.

Sitting at his kitchen table Gerry tries to put in order, then articulate, his new life in and out of hospitals, infections and fevers, shutdowns where he could not walk or work, MRIs, PET scans, CT scans, biopsies, medically worked over in ways he didn’t know existed while, all the time, the doctors hovered and muttered.

Then, in yet another Melbourne hospital, he lost it.

“It might have simply been the shock of this reality, it might have been stress, or fear, or all of it, but I simply withdrew from everything and have no real sense of how it happened or even what happened,” Gerry said, shuddering slightly at the memories.

“When I started coming back, I had no idea where I was or how I had got there; Amanda was telling me I was in my room, in the hospital, which sort of made sense to me at the time.”

It was at this point the surgery and the chemo and/or radiation were all ruled out.

For his treatment, Gerry’s medical teams have decided surgery might not be the best solution, especially with the complexity of the growth around the bottom of his spine, and they have opted to try immunotherapy.

Ironically, as if the theatre gods were reminding Gerry all success is transient, his Georgy-winning performance was in a play called A Better You.

“It wasn’t even a big role, we came on quite late in the show, but I have been amazed by how many people said they thought it was the highlight,” he said of the moment he and Ivy exploded on to the small stage in the cabaret style setting at Radcliffe’s.

“We had spent most of the show cramped into a little back room – it might have been the back bar at some point in the building’s history – before coming out well into the second half of the show.

“I have to admit it wasn’t my favourite show [but he has been warming to it since that Georgy was put in his hand], I was back as Ivy’s stage husband and getting bullied on to, and around, the stage, again. But it was a fun bit of the show and the audience certainly seemed to enjoy it.”

In between the good memories, Gerry suddenly mentioned that in 2015 he had to have a spot on his back excised and it was a melanoma so that meant a bigger cut than originally planned, as well as having lymph nodes removed.

It is also a definite downer at the table, with Gerry rolling his glass of sparkling water from hand to hand as he thinks about it.

“I went to Peter Mac for tests every year for five years, but they only did a skin check each visit. Not one scan or MRI. And then told me I had a five-year free tick,” he said, but with the first bitterness in his voice.

“I am a bit disappointed that’s how it was done, but they are the experts,” he said.

“Knowing what I do today I would never again let someone make that assessment without some very serious tests.

“It ended up with me needing medication for anxiety, for panic attacks I started having. Sometimes I would just freeze, stand there in a daze, and when I came to, I would be sweating and shaking.

“In many ways those sorts of things get put down to life these days, but I forced myself to wean off the pills and stopped them six months ago – they left you with your senses dulled.”

Gerry’s immunotherapy is based on the relatively new combination of the drugs nivolumab and ipilimumab, with the longest median overall survival in a phase III melanoma trial reported to date showing durable, improved clinical outcomes with nivolumab plus ipilimumab or nivolumab versus ipilimumab in patients with advanced melanoma and, in descriptive analyses, with the combination over nivolumab monotherapy.

It gives him a goal when he sits down with the man who has stepped in to script the next scenes of Gerry’s one-man show.

Rob Campbell is considered one of the go-to guys for cancer patients. Gerry recalled the guns in Melbourne constantly referring to him, even deferring to him.

And sitting down with Campbell has given Gerry and his family a much clearer picture of what is to come.

He will undergo infusions every 21 days, and fortunately they can now be done in Echuca. He had his first treatment there last week – his next in another week will be in the hospital’s new Wellness Centre. After a couple of months – unless something suddenly changes – it will be back on the testing carousel and then more treatments.

“He told us if all goes well, 50 per cent of patients like me will still be going in five years,” Gerry said.

“That’s not great, but it also is. It’s a biggish number and it’s much better than a zero, it is something you can work towards.

“Rob says chemotherapy is not as successful with melanoma, those percentages are way, way lower, so right now 50 per cent works for me.”

Spread across the table is Gerry’s library of love, the programs from all his shows. The size and quality of Li’l Abner’s compared to Phantom of the Opera is striking. Gerry ran his hand across them, seeming to absorb the memories, the good times, the fun with his ‘freaks’ and the rush, the elation of shows that hit the mark, with audience applause the reward for all the hours that go into those few shows each season.

“The Phantom was my most challenging; I listened to our recording just the other day,” he said, almost absentmindedly talking to himself.

“It all still sounds so good, I had two big songs, and all of us would listen to the others singing, hoping for them to hit every high note, remember every line, even if you didn’t yourself. It was the biggest challenge but was also the most rewarding.

“I rate The Addams Family, playing Gomez, as my biggest role (no prize for guessing who played Morticia) but what I rate most has been the friendship, hanging out with freaks like me.

“Spamalot was corny, but such good fun, and Anything Goes was another big test, I had to have four accents in four characters.”

It was also his first Georgy nomination but 2016 wasn’t to be his year.

“After the awards, Paul Denham muttered to me I should have won that award,” Gerry said.

“For me, that meant more than winning the Georgy,” he said about the EMTC co-founder who had insisted he be taken from his sickbed to see the final dress rehearsal of Phantom, the show he had always wanted the company to do but thought he would never see. This legend of local theatre would die before the Phantom season was completed.

“Phantom was my first live theatre experience, at Rockman’s Regency in 1990, I think it was,” Gerry said.

“I would also get to meet Michael Crawford, when he was here for the Logies and I was working at Crown.”

Sitting back, Gerry said this interview had been his longest conversation since he was diagnosed, and it has clearly drained him.

But his eyes came alive as he talked about his wife and his daughters.

Amanda, he said, was a city girl he bumped into when he and a mate dropped in to a Richmond hotel.

She is, he said, playing an almost unseen role through his illness, the one who has a better handle on what is happening to him, to them, and without her he would be lost.

And his daughters, who aren’t exactly watching from the wings, but who must still be battling to understand what is happening to their dad, to their family.

“My Ruby wears her heart on her sleeve, while Lulu internalises, keeps things to herself,” he said softly.

“They are both in Dillmac,” he added with unashamed pride and love.

Next year EMTC has Shrek on the drawing board, and it’s Gerry’s dream to not miss the show. He’s never missed one.

But by the time talk had turned to 2023, Gerry had had more than had enough, and desperately needed a rest.

Then the doorbell rang and two more visitors had arrived to “help cheer him up”, when all he wanted to do was probably lie down.

Looking back over his shoulder, Gerry offered the ghost of a smile as he shuffled towards the front door and his guests.

The show must go on.