by Brad Haddin
Before she drove off, Karina called her friend Rebecca, also a radiographer. She remained fairly calm at first but it all hit her as she said the words out loud: ‘Mia’s got a Wilms tumour.’ Rebecca let her cry it out then offered some practical comfort, reminding her how good the cancer treatment for children is in Australia. They were talking about what Karina needed to do next when another call came in. It was Dr Hingorani, ringing because he had just received a copy of the report via email. He also reassured Karina that Mia would get the very best of treatment and that all would be well. He said he would arrange for her to be seen by a paediatric specialist as an outpatient at Westmead, either the following day or Monday. The specialist would carry out further investigations and advise about treatment. All that Karina could do until then was to keep Mia as comfortable as possible.
Before she set off for her parents’ house to break the news to them face to face, Karina called my mum and dad in Queanbeyan. They were, of course, stunned and upset and offered to come up to Sydney straight away. Karina suggested they hold off until Mia had seen the specialist. She told my dad, Ross, that she hadn’t yet rung me because it was still the middle of the night where I was and she was going to wait just a little longer. She also said that maybe I’d be able to stay on with the team until we knew exactly what we were up against. Hearing in Karina’s voice that she was still in shock, Dad gently said to her that he was certain that I would want to come home right away. They finished the call and she steadied herself for the drive home.
Karina was on the road when Dr Hingorani called again. He’d just received the results of Mia’s blood test and it showed that her haemoglobin was dangerously low; in fact, it was only half what it should have been. The plan needed to be changed: she had to go to the Children’s Hospital that evening for a blood transfusion. When she reached her folks’ house, Karina quickly packed a bag for herself and Mia and anxiously waited for her parents and sister to get home. It was a very emotional scene when they arrived. Having been with Mia non-stop for the previous week, they all knew that something wasn’t right, but like everyone else they were knocked sideways by the news that it was cancer. Karina’s mum offered to go with them to the hospital for support. So Karina, Marg and Mia set out for the hour-long trip, leaving Phil and Danielle to look after Zac. Meanwhile Dad and my mum, Anne, having been updated on the transfusion development, also hit the road for the hospital, 280 kilometres away.
As instructed, Karina, Marg and Mia went to the busy Emergency Department and waited to be assessed by a triage nurse. The nurse went through the standard questions of the child’s name and date of birth. But everything suddenly changed when she asked, ‘And why have you brought her in today?’ and Karina answered, ‘We’ve just found out she’s got cancer and we’ve been told to come here so she can be admitted and receive a blood transfusion.’ The next minute they were ushered through to a single treatment room, where one of the Emergency doctors told Karina that Mia was being admitted under oncologist Dr Luciano Dalla-Pozza, who would come and see her the following morning. Karina told me later that the moments she came closest to breaking during these strange, awful hours were the ones when she had to say aloud — to our parents, her friend Bec and to the triage nurse — that our baby girl had cancer.
By around 9.30 p.m., the doctors had gathered all the information they could, various tests had been done and there was a lull while preparations were made for the transfusion. This gave Karina a chance to leave Marg with Mia and duck out to find a corridor where she could get phone reception and call me.
I felt sick in the guts as she told me what was going on and I choked on my words when I asked, ‘Is she going to die? Is Mia going to die?’ Karina reassured me that Wilms tumours were very treatable and children had an excellent survival rate. She told me we would know a lot more when the results of the various tests came back over the next seven days. I said, ‘Right, I’ll jump on a plane.’ Karina said, ‘Well, you probably don’t have to. How about I ring you in the morning after I’ve spoken to more people and we have a better idea what to expect?’
Looking back, this was a pretty amazing thing for her to have said. No doubt she was still affected by shock, but her response mostly came from her incredible strength and her deep knowledge and respect for all the effort involved for me to become an elite athlete playing at the highest level. It requires an unbelievable amount of dedication and determination to earn and keep a spot in the Australian Test team. Karina knew precisely what it had taken for me to get to where I was because she was the other half of the story. I couldn’t have been a family man and achieved what I had done if she hadn’t been there, willing to be basically a single parent for months at a time, picking up all the other pieces so I could concentrate on cricket. As she had done so often before with other things involving the kids, she was offering to shoulder the immediate load with Mia.
But this was so different from anything we had ever faced before that there was no question in my mind, not a flicker, not a particle of doubt: I needed to be there with my family, not 16,000 kilometres away on the other side of the planet. I said, ‘No, I’m coming. I’ll be there as soon as I can. Kiss Mia for me. I love you. I’ll send you the flight details as soon as I have them.’
I jumped up, threw on some clothes and went straight to the room of our team manager, Gavin Dovey. He wondered who the hell was knocking on his door so early but one look at my face told him there was a good reason for it. I said, ‘Mate, I’ve got to go home. Mia’s just been to the doctor, she’s got a tumour. Can you get me on a flight as soon as possible?’ Gav quickly expressed his concern and told me he’d get it sorted.
I went back to my room in a state of numbness and changed into clothes I could fly in. When we travelled as a team we wore specially marked gear but I wasn’t a cricketer anymore, I was a husband and a father. I pulled on my own civvy clothes, threw a few things in a bag and left everything else as it was. I stared sightlessly around. My suit was hung with the tie knotted around it, ready for the next official function. There was a pair of bright orange running shoes on the floor and three cricket bats leaning against the wardrobe. None of it seemed to have any connection to me — I might never have seen any of it before for all the sense it made. I went straight past my kitbag. I even left my toiletries bag behind as I walked out of the room on automatic pilot.
In the few minutes since I’d spoken to him, Gav had filled in the team captain, Michael Clarke, and the coach, Mickey Arthur. I saw them both in the team room and they wished me all the best, as did the other players who were now up and at breakfast had heard the news. The guys I was closest to on the tour — Peter Siddle, Nathan Lyon, Mitchell Johnson and fitness trainer Stuart Karppinen — sought me out to see how I was doing. There wasn’t much I could say beyond the fact that I was going home because Mia had a tumour. They were all naturally upset for me.
Gav updated me on the travel situation: there was a spot on the next available flight, which departed in four hours. But, he explained apologetically, it involved going the long way round. Normally we returned from the Caribbean via Miami then LA and back across the Pacific. I could take that shorter route if I was prepared to wait until the next day to depart. But I just couldn’t; I had to be there with my little girl. So instead I would fly St Vincent to Barbados, where there was a six-hour wait before the next flight, from Barbados to London’s Gatwick Airport. From there I would transfer by cab to Heathrow, then fly back to Australia via Singapore. In all, it would be 42 agonising hours before I landed in Sydney.
A car had been arranged to get me to the airport, but first Gav asked me to speak to the Cricket Australia media liaison personnel travelling with us. They started talking about putting out a media release saying I was leaving the tour because my daughter had been diagnosed with a tumour. That snapped me out of my daze. I said, ‘No, you’re not doing that. You just say, “Brad Haddin has gone home for personal reasons.”’ They weren’t happy with that, saying that
there would be intense media scrutiny unless all the facts were explained. I said again, ‘No.’ They tried to convince me that revealing the fact that I had a sick child would lead to less intrusion in the end. I said, ‘No, absolutely not. You don’t understand. My grandmother doesn’t know yet. Karina’s grandmothers don’t know. They cannot hear it on the news. Just say “personal reasons” and “we ask everyone to respect their privacy at this time”.’ My insistence carried the day and that’s how the release was worded.
I got in the car and headed for the airport. There was still three hours until the flight and Gav had asked if I would prefer to wait at the hotel rather than sit on display in the basic little terminal building. But even though St Vincent is a very small island, less than 30 kilometres long, I didn’t want to risk any delays that might make me miss the flight. I needed to feel that I was on my way.
I knew that Karina would be back in the room with Mia and unable to talk but I sent her a copy of the itinerary for my flights. I called Dad. It was nearly 11 p.m. Sydney time and he and Mum had almost reached Westmead. There wasn’t much we could say to each other, but we said it. I gave him my arrival details and he said he’d be there to pick me up.
Around the time my plane was taking off, Mia’s four-hour blood transfusion began. I spoke to Karina again during the long wait at Barbados and she said it had had a huge effect on Mia. The doctors had said she would feel much better after it and they were right. Karina described how she had rosy little cheeks for the first time in what we now realised was weeks and weeks. As well as her low haemoglobin, the doctors were very concerned about Mia’s high blood pressure, a direct result of the tumour, but they were giving her medication for that. I hated being so far away but she was in expert hands and it seemed as if the outlook was positive. Little did we know.
While I was still at the airport at Barbados my phone rang: it was the radio 2UE sports team calling for one of the interviews I regularly did with them. Playing and training is a huge part of the working life of a professional athlete, but you also have many other obligations and responsibilities in your packed schedule: sponsor commitments, public engagements and media appearances. I’d always been able to fulfil all these commitments, maintaining intense focus on the game itself while also keeping on top of all the other details. But by the time I hung up from that initial call from Karina I had completely switched off from everything cricket. It was like stepping through a doorway. The thing that had taken up such a huge part of my life for so many years was gone in an instant. There was no room for it when every single part of me was occupied with the knowledge of the fight we had on our hands with Mia.
I answered the phone, saying, ‘Mate, can’t talk. I’m on my way home. My daughter’s sick. Bye,’ and hung up. To its huge credit, the station didn’t exploit this bit of inside knowledge over the following days and weeks when speculation about why I’d left the tour was running wild. Along with everyone else (including the close friends Karina emailed in the middle of the night from Mia’s bedside) they did what we’d asked in the media release and respected our privacy. It made a big difference.
The flight from Barbados to London is eight and a half hours. Normally I would pass the time by watching movies but I couldn’t focus on anything outside my own swirling thoughts and feelings and I felt too sick with worry to really eat or drink. The hours crept by as I lay there trying to tell myself not to leap ahead until we had all the facts.
While I was high above the Atlantic, Friday morning arrived in Sydney and Mia’s oncologist (that phrase made my heart clutch) had come to see her for the first time. Dr Luciano Dalla-Pozza is actually the head of Westmead Children’s Hospital Oncology Department but there’s nothing formal or stuffy about him. He’s known to one and all as Dr Luce (he gently corrected us every time we called him Dr Dalla-Pozza) and, as we were to discover, he has a wonderful way with both cancer-stricken children and their fear-stricken parents. Dr Luce told Karina that as well as causing her haemoglobin to be low, the tumour was pressing up on the bottom of Mia’s lungs, making it hard for her to breathe. It was awful to think about how long this thing might have been growing inside her before its presence became clear enough for a diagnosis, but he told Karina it was best not to focus on things we couldn’t change or control. He reassured her that we couldn’t have been expected to guess Mia had a serious problem any earlier than we did.
He also said that while many of the signs pointed to Mia’s disease being a Wilms tumour there was the possibility it might be another type of cancer that commonly starts in the adrenal glands, neuroblastoma. Not wanting to cause unnecessary alarm, he didn’t say much about neuroblastoma, but Karina remembered enough from university to know that it was a very different and much more aggressive cancer. We had well and truly fallen down the rabbit hole: still in shock at the news her child had cancer at all, Karina now found herself hoping and praying that it was the ‘good’ kind.
Later that day a CT scan, done under general anaesthetic, revealed the size and location of the tumour but didn’t clarify the diagnosis, although there were worrying signs pointing to neuroblastoma. We wouldn’t know any more until a biopsy was done to remove a little of the tumour tissue and some of her bone marrow and these samples were analysed. These procedures also had to be done under a general anaesthetic. It was almost the weekend, and even though Mia was on an emergency list, the earliest they would happen was Monday — and it would take several days after that to get the pathology results. In the meantime, the doctors were trying to stabilise Mia’s heart rate, which often raced dangerously, and her still-high blood pressure.
Karina had to break all this to me after I landed in London, during the hour-long transfer from one airport to the other. She did a great job of staying calm and upbeat about it, not wanting to make the next 24 hours even worse for me than she knew they already would be. Protecting my family was such a huge part of my role in life, but right now I couldn’t do a single thing to help any of them.
I hadn’t really taken in the name ‘Wilms tumour’ in Karina’s first phone call, but now I scribbled it down along with ‘neuroblastoma’ and when we said our goodbyes I Googled them one after the other. I found out what Karina already knew about Wilms tumours: that they had a very high survival rate and required relatively straightforward treatment — as much as you can say that about treating any young child for cancer. If caught early enough, the cancer could be removed by surgery, and even though this usually meant also removing the affected kidney, this treatment was not considered very drastic. And, if the cancer was in the very early stage, it might not even be necessary to follow up with chemo or radiation therapy.
Then I searched ‘neuroblastoma’ and what I saw scared the hell out of me. The ‘blastoma’ part meant that it was a disease that affected cells that were still developing (that’s why this term appears in the name of many childhood cancers). ‘Neuro’ didn’t mean to do with the brain; it meant to do with the nervous system. In two-thirds of cases this type of cancer has already spread to other parts of the body by the time it is found. As with any cancer, there are different stages of tumour growth for neuroblastoma, but there are also differences in the tumour itself and some forms of it are much worse than others, with survival rates as low as two children in five. Feeling like I was going to throw up, I quickly shut down the browser on my phone.
Despite keeping to myself and not wearing any Cricket Australia logos, a few people did recognise me over the course of that hellish trip and some of them came up to talk to me, either while we were waiting to board or during the flights. Normally those sorts of approaches, often with a request for a selfie, are just part of the deal when you play for your country. You’re not high profile in the way a pop star is, but you are a public figure and for people who are big cricket fans you’re definitely a drawcard. My policy is to appreciate the interest and whenever possible give people the bit of conversation or the photo they’re hoping for. I have no idea how I behaved wi
th the people who approached me during this journey. I hope I was polite. I know I tried to be, even when I was attempting to end the encounter as quickly as possible. In answer to why I was no longer in the West Indies, I think once or twice I blurted out, ‘My daughter’s sick. I’m on my way home.’
As soon as I could after we’d taken off from Heathrow I swallowed a couple of sleeping pills. It was an attempt to knock myself out so I could avoid having to talk to other people and, more importantly, avoid having to think about what lay ahead. I woke up as we were coming into Singapore and immediately felt my entire body tense up in fear of the news that might await me when I turned my phone back on. No matter how much I tried to tell myself it wasn’t going to happen, I couldn’t shake the thought that there could be a message from Karina telling me Mia had died while I’d been in the air. Even after I’d double-checked to make sure there was no such message, I felt shaky, with what seemed like a million and one emotions sweeping over me.
I’m always happy to come back to Australia but I’ve never felt anything like the intense relief shot through with dread I felt when we touched down in Sydney at 8.10 that Saturday night. As well as the anxiety about what state Mia would be in, I was worried about the prospect of media waiting at the airport. I’d often been on flights where our arrival was supposed to be kept private and yet we’d land and find photographers and journalists waiting. It would be bad enough for me to have to deal with that, but what would it be like for Dad? How would he react?