The doctor whose treatment has kept actor Sam Neill alive since he was diagnosed with a rare form of blood cancer is the ex-partner of game show host Andrew O’Keefe.
Blood disease specialist Orly Lavee and the former Deal or No Deal host shared a home during their multi-year relationship.
The haematologist and mother of two made a prominent appearance on Monday night’s episode of Australian Story, which covered Neill’s battle with stage three blood cancer.
The doctor treating Sam Neill for a rare form of blood cancer is the ex-partner of game show host Andrew O’Keefe. Blood disease specialist Orly Lavee and the former Deal Or No Deal host (above) dated for a few years
Neill, the star of “Jurassic Park,” dedicated his recent memoir, “Did I Ever Tell You This?” – written during my cancer treatment – to Dr. Lavee and “all my friends in St. Vincent.”
Dr. Lavee works at St Vincent’s Hospital in Darlinghurst in Sydney and has been caring for the Jurassic Park star since diagnosing him with an aggressive form of lymphoma last year.
Neill dedicated his recent memoir Did I Ever Tell You This? – which was written while he was being treated for cancer – to Dr. Lavee and “all my friends in St. Vincent.”
“Without you I wouldn’t have started the book,” he wrote. “And I certainly never would have finished it.”
The 76-year-old told Australian Story that chemotherapy was unsuccessful and left him in a “battle for life” that he hoped to win but was not afraid of losing.
For a year, his body has been successfully fighting angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma with a drug developed by Dr. Lavee prescribed experimental drug.
Despite this promising treatment, Neill said he was told that one day the drug would no longer work and he was prepared for that possibility.
Dr. Lavee (above) works at St Vincent’s Hospital in Darlinghurst in Sydney and has been caring for Neill since diagnosing him with an aggressive form of lymphoma last year
Neill told Australian Story he was not afraid of dying. “That doesn’t worry me. “It never worried me from the start,” said the 76-year-old. He is pictured with son Tim Neill-Harrow
“I’m not afraid of dying at all,” he said. “That doesn’t worry me. It never worried me to begin with, but I would be annoyed.
“I would get annoyed because there are things I still want to do.” Very irritating, dying. But I’m not afraid of it.’
Neill learned he had cancer on his first trip back to New Zealand after two years of Covid-19 lockdowns making it virtually impossible to return home to see his family.
Dr. Lavee had called Neill with the bad news less than two hours after his return.
“It’s always a difficult conversation, especially when you’re not in front of anyone,” she told the ABC show.
“What we found was a cancer, a particularly rare type of lymphoma, which is non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, but it’s quite rare and it’s a pretty aggressive tumor that if left untreated will cause big problems very quickly.”
Neill’s most famous international role was that of Dr. Alan Grant in Jurassic Park. He is pictured with Laura Dern, who plays Dr. Ellie Sattler plays in the 1993 Steven Spielberg film
Neill’s son Tim Neill-Harrow told Australian Story what happened next: “When he hung up and we sat down and cried together for a bit.”
“It was supposed to be a happy day. “He couldn’t stay,” he said.
Neill said: “I was really fighting for my life.” And everything was a new world and a pretty disturbing world.
“I had three or four months of fairly conventional chemotherapies, which are brutal.”
After Neill’s first round of chemotherapy, the cancer came back even worse, so Dr. Lavee was looking for a new treatment method.
“I was surprised,” she said. “I was obviously just as concerned as he was that his disease was behaving so aggressively.”
“The tumor began to outsmart the medication before we even went through the first therapy.”
Dr. Lavee suggested trying a second line of treatment—“more novel agents”—to which she said Neill soon responded “excellently.”
“Some people forego further treatment if they found the previous treatment to be very harsh,” said Dr. Lavee.
“But he really wanted to move on and try something new. “We had to think about what the next step would be to try to salvage things.”
Neill began writing the memoir that would become Did I Ever Tell You This? as a record of his life for his children and grandchildren during treatment.
“During this treatment he shared with me that he had the idea of writing a book,” said Dr. Lavee.
“At the time, he was taking a lot of steroid medication as part of his treatment, which was giving him a lot of energy and preventing him from sleeping particularly well, and he was burning the midnight oil by writing chapter after chapter of this book at an incredible pace.”
“I thought I should probably cut back on the steroids at some point.”
Neill (above) began writing the memoir that would become Did I Ever Tell You This? as a record of his life for his children and grandchildren during treatment
Luckily, the new treatment regimen worked and Neill has been in remission for a year, but he knows one day it won’t work anymore.
“I know I have it, but I don’t really care,” he said of the cancer.
“It’s out of my control. If you can’t control it, don’t get into it.”
Neill now receives infusions every two weeks and will continue to do so for the rest of his life or until the medication no longer works.
Dr. Lavee said if Neill no longer responds to his current treatment, “we may need to consider a third-line option.”
“That’s a difficult thing to carry with you day after day, waiting for that to happen,” she told Australian Story.