Erin Molan on her sister: "I wouldn't have been able to function without you."

“You are the most inspirational person I’ve ever known, and I’m so blessed to have you as a sister.”

It might be the interview of her career.

Erin Molan, one of the most prominent female voices in Australian sport reporting, has spoken about her 33-year-old sister’s battle with bowel cancer in an emotional interview on The Footy Show.

29-year-old Molan, who is a co-host on The Footy Show, spoke honestly about how difficult it’s been in the years since her sister’s diagnosis.

Molan’s sister, Sarah Sutton, was diagnosed at the age of 29, just after she had given birth to her second child.

“It was such a shock. I’m now in the fight of my life. We honestly never at any stage thought cancer,” Sutton, who has been in remission for four years, said.

One of the first signs that something was wrong occurred when people began commenting on Sutton’s dramatic weight loss after she gave birth.

“A couple of people had commented that … my post-baby weight loss was going really, really well. But I was a little bit concerned about how much weight I was losing, and the fact that I was going to the toilet so often, and the fact that it was basically diarrhoea the whole time.”

It was after a consultation that stage-three bowel cancer was revealed.

“I was picturing worse case scenarios of: How do you say goodbye to someone that you’ve only just started to get to know? And you haven’t really had enough time to get to know people. And you haven’t done all the things that you want to do with your life. So that was really, really, really awful,” she said.

Molan asked her sister how she informed her family, including her daughter who was four at the time.

“Everything that we did, and all the conversations that we had, were all based around that idea that mummy was sick, but that the doctors were very, very clever and that they were going to try very, very hard,” Sutton said.

“If I wasn’t lucky enough to be sitting here today, I wouldn’t want her to have that idea that we hadn’t prepared her for what might have been coming.”

Feeling helpless through her sister’s battle, Molan became an ambassador for Bowel Cancer Australia three years ago.

The interview ends with a message that Molan and her sister hope will save lives. They say four thousand people die every year from bowel cancer, but 90% can be saved through early detection.

You can watch a section of the interview below. Post continues after video.

“​If I went through everything that I’ve gone through and didn’t take advantage of every platform available to me, and every megaphone, and every soapbox available to me, to try and make sure that there’s not someone else sitting in my shoes, I would have real trouble looking at myself in the mirror,” Sutton said.

Molan became emotional at the end of the interview when they began talking about the possibility of Sutton’s battle ending differently.

“I get asked all the time who is the most impressive person I’ve interviewed,” Molan said, crying.

“I’ve interviewed some very big sporting stars in my life, but you are the most inspirational person I’ve ever known, and I’m so blessed to have you as a sister. And thank God you got tested because we wouldn’t function without you.”

For more information on bowel cancer, click here. To watch the full interview, click here.

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