Minnamurra musician Timothy Bowen has announced he is battling cancer, more than two decades after his sister - Nashville TV darling Clare Bowen - defeated the disease as a child.
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The 25-year-old singer/songwriter underwent tests late last year after he experienced persistent shortness of breath and back pain.
Three days after Christmas, he was diagnosed with a blood cancer, Primary Mediastinal B Cell lymphoma.
He spent New Year’s Eve in Wollongong Hospital with partner Christina and family at his side, ahead of his first round of chemotherapy on January 8.
“While the news has hit harder than a sledgehammer, I am filled will hope,” he wrote on social media.
“The incredible team of doctors looking after me are confident that this thing can be cured. They haven't wasted a single second.”
The cancer was detected about 27 years after Clare Bowen was diagnosed with end-stage nephroblastoma, a form of kidney cancer, at age four.
With her Nashville-based singer/songwriter fiance Brandon Robert Young in tow, the starlet flew home to be at her brother’s side.
“[Young] and I dropped everything this Christmas and went back to Australia for the beginning of Tim's walk through fire,” Bowen, 31, told fans this week.
“We are now back in Nashville, far from the Bowen tribe, and sending prayers across the ocean. I don't know why my parents have to go through this again, but they're the strongest people I know ...The battle has just begun.”
Clare Bowen spent years of her childhood without hair due to her cancer treatment.
In November she made a pixie cut of her famously platinum, waist-length locks, after hearing of a little girl who "couldn't be a princess because she didn't have long hair".
"I wanted her, and others like her to know that's not what makes a princess, or a warrior, or a superhero," she then explained.
“It's not what makes you beautiful either. It's your insides that count … even if you happen to be missing half of them.”
Performances at Sydney’s Brass Monkey and Newtown Social Club have been cancelled in light of the diagnosis.
It comes after a solid year for the younger Bowen, who completed his first national tour in December.
He had released an acoustic EP – Steel and Wood – and had co-written a song due to air on his sister’s hit show later this year.
With its deep industry connections, Nashville has afforded its stars performing opportunities at some of America’s most hallowed country music venues.
Last year the older Bowen surprised her little brother with an invitation onto the famous Grand Old Opry stage, to play his original song, Learn to Love Again.
“It’s the biggest audience I’ve ever played to, and the feeling I got as I walked onto that stage in front of 5,500 people for the first time will never leave me for as long as I live,” he later wrote.