For more than three decades, Chris Reason has reported some of the biggest stories imaginable for Australian television.
But there was one story he could never cover from a distance: his own fight for survival.
More than two decades after cancer nearly took his life, the veteran Seven journalist can look back on the moment everything changed — and the family he once believed he might never have.
Now, in 2026, it has been around 23 years since Reason was given the all-clear after his second battle with cancer.
And the life waiting for him on the other side of that ordeal was one he could hardly have imagined.
“You fight or you give up”
Reason has never forgotten the moment when the noise surrounding his illness suddenly seemed to disappear.
He was just 37 when he was confronted with the possibility that he might not survive.
After months of chemotherapy, gruelling treatment and an extremely complicated operation, he reached a point where one thought became overwhelmingly clear.
He wanted to live.
“There’s a great moment of clarity that happens,” he recalled.
“You have this moment of realisation that you have one of two choices – you fight or you give up.”
For Reason, the choice was obvious.
But getting there would be one of the hardest battles of his life.
The cancer he thought he had beaten returned
Reason was first diagnosed with testicular cancer in 1998, when he was 33.
He underwent surgery to remove his right testicle and believed he had overcome the disease.
Four years later, however, the cancer returned — this time spreading to his abdomen.
The timing was particularly cruel.
Reason was at the height of his television career and had just begun presenting Sunrise alongside Melissa Doyle.
But he had missed an important annual check-up while working around the clock, including covering the September 11 attacks in New York.
By October 2002, he was forced to step away from the breakfast programme and begin another fight for his life.
Six months of treatment that pushed him to the edge
What followed was a brutal combination of chemotherapy, radiotherapy and surgery.
The treatment left him dealing with vomiting, severe weight loss, hair loss, mouth ulcers and lung damage.
At one point, even his determination began to falter.
Reason has recalled walking into the chemotherapy ward one morning, breaking down in tears and admitting that he did not know how much more he could take.
The surgery itself was extraordinarily demanding.
Doctors performed a retroperitoneal lymph node dissection, a highly complex procedure that took around nine hours.
The tumours were located in an extremely difficult position, and there was no guarantee the operation would succeed.
For a man who had spent his career reporting from war zones, disasters and some of the world’s most dangerous places, this was a confrontation he could not simply walk away from.
At 37, life suddenly looked very different
Before cancer, Reason had been focused heavily on his career.
Marriage, children and settling down were not necessarily at the top of his list.
But being confronted with the possibility of dying at such a young age changed his priorities completely.
The things that once seemed important suddenly became much smaller.
Life itself became the priority.
And when he eventually emerged from that second battle, he began to see the future differently.
Perhaps, he realised, there was still time to embrace the parts of life he had previously put aside.
Then came the woman he never expected to meet
Reason found love with fellow journalist Kathryn Robinson.
The couple married in 2005, and their relationship would become one of the great gifts of the life he had fought so hard to preserve.
For someone who had once wondered whether he would even live long enough to experience a family of his own, what happened next was extraordinary.
Reason and Robinson eventually became parents to twins, Sam and Lucy, born in 2007.
But becoming parents was not straightforward.
Four rounds of IVF — and one final piece of hope
The couple went through four gruelling rounds of IVF before finally conceiving their twins.
Because of his cancer treatment, Reason had preserved sperm before beginning the ordeal.
It was another deeply personal battle — one that had nothing to do with television ratings, breaking news or awards.
It was simply about whether he could have the family he had once feared cancer might take away from him.
And eventually, after everything he had already endured, that dream came true.
“I was so happy to have just been handed life back”
Reason has described the birth of Sam and Lucy as one of the greatest moments of his life.
He remembered being asked to remove his shirt and holding both babies against his bare chest in the quiet of the hospital room.
After everything — the diagnosis, the chemotherapy, the fear, the surgery and the uncertainty — he was suddenly holding the two lives he had once wondered whether he would ever have.
It was, in his words, as though life had been handed back to him.
And that moment became a powerful reminder of just how much had changed.
More than 20 years later, the perspective remains
By 2026, Reason has been in remission for roughly 23 years.
He has continued to build an extraordinary career with Seven, becoming one of Australia’s most respected and experienced television journalists. He has covered wars, natural disasters, terrorism and some of the most significant events of the past several decades, while earning major journalism honours along the way.
Yet perhaps the most meaningful part of his story happened away from the newsroom.
The man who once feared he might never experience love or fatherhood eventually found both.
Today, he and Kathryn have been married for more than two decades, while their twins have grown from the babies he once held in that quiet hospital room into young adults.
The strange gift hidden inside the worst chapter of his life
Reason has never suggested that cancer was anything other than devastating.
But he has also spoken about the strange perspective it gave him.
The illness forced him to stop, reassess everything and understand that the things we spend so much time worrying about can suddenly become meaningless when life itself is at stake.
Cancer nearly took his future away.
Instead, surviving it gave him a future he had never been certain he would see.
A wife he never expected to meet. Two children he once feared he would never have. And more than two decades of life beyond the diagnosis.
For Chris Reason, perhaps the most powerful part of the story is not simply that he survived.
It is everything that was waiting for him after he did. ❤️????