To Our Girls, He's Just Daddy

When Michael Bellert suffered an aneurysm at 30, the prognosis was bleak. His only option was aged care, but wife Lauren had other ideas. She tells Susan Horsburgh why the young need to be kept out of nursing homes.

- Susan Horsburgh

Lauren Bellert didn’t want to be a burden, so when she was 26 and the shakes she thought were just anxiety turned out to be Parkinson’s disease, she gave her fiancé an out. “I said, ‘Look, I don’t know what the future’s going to hold, but I understand if you don’t want to marry this potential future’,” she recalls.

By then, Michael was 28 and had loved her for almost a decade. He didn’t waver. “He was like, ‘I don’t care, I’m going to be there and we’ll deal with this together’.” Michael promised that he would look after Lauren when the time came – but life, as it often does, had other plans.

Just two years later, when Lauren was three months pregnant with twins, an aneurysm ruptured in Michael’s brain, leaving him unable to walk or talk, in need of around-the-clock care. The tables were forever turned.

Almost five years have passed since that catastrophic day, but the heartbreak still isn’t far from the surface. Lauren cries through much of our two-hour conversation, but there is a strength there, too. She has a heart tattooed on her right wrist to remind her she can face anything and the wings inked on her left wrist are a tribute to her four-year-old daughters, Ava and Audrey.

“They’re my guardian angels because I don’t believe I would have got out of bed every morning after all this happened if it wasn’t for them,” says the 33-year-old. “They’re also the things that keep Michael going.”