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My Cancer Journey
This is me before I got cancer. May 2021. I’m 8 years old, I’m in year 4, I like playing the guitar, horse back riding, skiing, and playing with my friends.
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In June 2021, I started to have a tummy ache that did not go away. I also stopped eating and had to throw up all the time. I basically lost all my energy.
A couple of GPs thought it was a stomach infection, but after my school teacher recommended seeing a specialist right away, they did an ultrasound of my tummy in hospital, and saw that it was stage 4 burkitt lymphoma - that’s a cancer of the lymphatic system. This meant that some of my white blood cells didn't work properly. They started to divide constantly but because they didn’t develop fully, they could not fight infections as normal white blood cells do.
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So, my body was making abnormal lymphocytes. Nobody knows why or what causes that. But I had to go to hospital immediately to start treatment. The aim of treatment is to destroy as many cancerous cells as possible.
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Because I could not eat, one of the first lines in my body I got was an “NG tube” - the yellow tube in the picture. From that moment on, all I was eating and drinking went through that tube. We called it my ‘astronaut food’!
Because I had to go to the Children’s oncology ward in Christchurch (CHOC), the whole family went with me and we rushed from Queenstown to Christchurch. My brother and sister started at a new school, and the whole family except for me went from the Ronald McDonald house to a rental close to hospital so that mum or dad could be with me 24/7. A lot of change for all of us.
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After the first chemo cycles started, my hair started to get thinner and thinner and ultimately fell out completely. We cut my hair before that happened, and also because it was extremely itchy!
We found a very good solution for the itchy hair though: we used the blue plastic shoe covers that doctors and nurses use in operating theatres as a hat! I could finally sleep again and it looked funny!
Oh, by the way, the other lines you see in my chest are there so that medicine can go in my blood directly and they don't have to jab me all the time.
Because I was in bed all the time, I was not strong enough to walk on my own anymore. Every now and then I could go out of the hospital for a few hours in a wheel chair. Here I’m trying to play tennis, which of course was pretty hard. You can also see my astronaut food on my lap because it was always connected to my tube.
Back in hospital, I spent most of my time in bed. As you can see, I always had my lion and tiger cuddly toys with me to keep me company!
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After a few rounds of chemo therapy, unfortunately there were some serious complications.
My body was so weak that it could not fight back against baddies anymore. I could not breathe well anymore and had to go to the high-care and later intensive care units of the hospital. They tried everything they could to make me better. Each pump you see in the picture is a different type of medicine I had to have.
Unfortunately, despite all the different medications, I kept getting worse and worse. At some point, oxygen had to be pumped into my lungs and I was kept asleep for a very long time: about two weeks..
While I was being kept asleep, I was airlifted to PICU, the kids intensive care unit in Starship hospital in Auckland.
There, I managed to turn it around and slowly started to breathe on my own again - first still with the help of different machines and pumps, but later on my own. When they woke me up from my long sleep, I noticed that I was in a different hospital! Pretty scary and not a lot of fun.
You see in these pictures that my lion and tiger are helping me (and the doctors) to keep all lines and tubes in place - they never left my side!
Fortunately, after a little while, we could leave the intensive care, and go back to Christchurch hospital. The Starship medical plane flew me back, and this time I was awake so that I could experience it.
I got a bit nauseous at the end of the flight, but other than that it was pretty special to have an entire plan for just me, the pilots, a nurse, and my dad!
When we got back to Christchurch, I was still pretty weak because my body had been through so much. But with a lot of rest and care in Choc, and a bit of fun at times (here with my brother!), I slowly got back to being a ‘normal cancer patient’.
When I felt up for it, I sometimes could facetime with my class back home. At first, I couldn’t speak so my mum would tell my friends how things were going. But later on, I could speak myself and we even cracked some jokes (sometimes)
In total, I needed 6 chemo cycles in 6 months. And when I got close to the end, I was strong enough to get out of bed on my own again.
I started to make the full Child Cancer Foundation beads of courage chain. Every bead you see you get for a specific action (for instance, every night in hospital, a ride in an ambulance, a type of operation, etc). Given everything that I had gone through, you can see that I had a loooooong chain!
I'd had plenty of time to think about what I wanted to do after leaving the hospital.
I wanted to do something cool, and we decided to go to a go-karting arena straight out of hospital!
When I came back home, I found a four-leave clover. I’m back!
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