by Brad Haddin
If her tumour didn’t have that gene she would be treated with a combination of chemotherapy, eight rounds most likely, plus surgery. The chemo would aim to shrink the tumour in her abdomen so that it could be taken out surgically, and it would hopefully kill off all the remaining cancer cells, including the ones that had spread into her bones. If she did have the gene, the treatment would be much longer and more intense. The chemo would be a higher dose, and it and the surgery would be just the start. Hope flickered to life again: Please let the pathology not show the gene. What she’s facing already is so much more than enough, please let hers be the less terrible kind of tumour. As upset and stunned as Karina and I were by what we’d learned, we couldn’t show it in front of Mia. We had to do our best to hold it together and pretend to be happy for her sake. There were a lot of deep breaths and plenty of turning away for a moment.
When the time came for me to head home to Zac, my brother Michael and Amy and Molly, Mia seemed content watching DVDs and playing on an iPad, although she’d had a couple more vomits. The medical team had put her on two different kinds of medication designed to get her blood pressure under control, one fast-acting and one long-term. She was also on antibiotics to get rid of the suspected infection, painkillers to relieve her discomfort and laxatives because all the other medications had blocked her up. Her cancer treatment hadn’t even started yet.
In the middle of the night she went suddenly and rapidly downhill and her heart rate shot back up to 180, bringing the emergency response team racing in. They stabilised her and she eventually got a few hours’ sleep, but she was awake when I arrived at 6 o’clock on Thursday morning. Karina filled me in on what had happened, including the fact that even though Mia was hungry and showing us she wanted food, we weren’t allowed to give her anything. She had to fast in case she needed another scan to find out what was causing her vital signs to fluctuate so wildly and what had caused her haemoglobin to drop again to the point where they had started yet another transfusion.
It was exactly one week since Karina had strapped Mia into her car-seat and headed to our GP. Dr Santosh came in with the results of the core biopsy. The news was exactly what we didn’t want to hear: Mia’s tumour had the MYCN gene. To give her any chance of beating it, they had to treat her in the most aggressive way possible. That meant high-dose chemo, surgery, more chemo, a bone marrow transplant, radiation therapy and something called immunotherapy. This brought long-term risks that started with infertility and radiation-induced secondary cancers and went on from there. But without it our beautiful daughter would certainly die.
Mum and Dad came to visit before heading back home to Queanbeyan and we told them where things stood. Karina phoned her parents and filled them in. We all told each other that this kid was a fighter and if anyone could make it she would, and the doctors were the best, and she was definitely going to get through this, and we would deal with it all one step at a time. But I couldn’t get the metallic taste of fear out of my mouth.
Dr Santosh had also told us that the drop in Mia’s haemoglobin made them suspect she might have a slow internal bleed so they would be going ahead with the scan, a CT this time, under general anaesthetic of course.
Some time after Mia had been taken in for the scan, Dr Luce came back to see us and, finding Dad and I there, asked to speak to us. He said hospitals weren’t always very nice places and despite the best efforts everyone made, things didn’t always work out and the doctors weren’t able to save everyone. I took what he said to be a follow-on from what he and Dr Santosh had told Karina and me previously — about Mia having the gene that made everything worse. Only much later did I realise that wasn’t what he meant at all.
He knew the scan was confirming the team’s suspicions. Apart from all the other effects it was having, the tumour was surrounding and damaging blood vessels inside Mia’s body, weakening them and making them leak. That’s why each transfusion they had given her only fixed the problem temporarily. Even as blood was being put into her veins, it was leaking out somewhere else. They were going to perform surgery to try to stop it. However, far from it being another simple procedure like a transfusion or a biopsy, this was an incredibly complicated all-or-nothing roll of the dice. At the time, I didn’t twig to any of this.
I hugged my parents goodbye and told them to drive safely, then went back and passed on to Karina what Dr Luce had said. We didn’t have a clue that he was preparing us for the worst and that, as we talked, Mia was a hair’s-breadth away from death.
CHAPTER 4
FINDING MY POWER
WHILE EACH DAY BROUGHT us more news about what Mia was up against, the West Indies vs Australia one-dayers had got underway in the Caribbean. I often passed TVs tuned to the matches in the patient lounges or heard scores on the radio in the car as I was driving back and forth to the hospital, but it was as if it was all happening on the other side of a thick glass wall. It didn’t seem to have much connection to me at all — a very strange thing, when cricket had occupied so much of my mind for so many decades.
Certainly at 15 I’d thought about little else, especially after my parents agreed to let me play first grade for the ANU Cricket Club in the 1993–94 season (back then, no girl could hold a candle to a great day’s play). I’d convinced them that I could handle it but there was a part of me that still wasn’t entirely sure. I felt confident that if I was given enough time I would make it, but the sliver of doubt remained because I knew I had only three games to prove myself and I wasn’t sure how quickly I’d be able to switch from fifth-grade cricket to this whole new level.
Despite the club’s name, players didn’t have to have any connection with the Australian National University to join; anyone who wanted to play grade cricket could sign up and aim to get on a team. So I wasn’t playing with uni students just a few years older than me, I was a 15-year-old playing with experienced men, many in their late twenties or thirties. They’d been playing first grade for years, in one case for over a decade, and they expected me to get up to speed quickly. They were taking a big risk on me — I hadn’t earned the right to be there in the usual way, hadn’t done my time and worked my way up through the grades. Was I really good enough to deserve this exceptional opportunity? The only thing I could do to shrink those inner doubts was train even harder to try to eliminate any weaknesses. Then I’d just have to walk out there and give it everything I had.
Being so small meant that, while I had form with the bat, I lacked power. In addition to the rest of my training, I worked at strengthening my forearms using a simple but effective piece of equipment Dad made for me. It was a cricket bat handle attached to a rope which had a weight at the other end. With my hands parallel, I would dip and raise one side then the other in a smaller version of the kind of motion you’d use to paddle a kayak. As the handle dipped and rose, the weighted rope would wind up around it and then wind down again. I spent hours training on it in my bedroom, picturing myself strong enough to smash sixes out of the ground.
My first match with the club in September 1993 — my first-grade debut — was always going to be memorable, but it proved to be an absolute baptism of fire. We bowled first. While they had signed me up for my wicketkeeping skills, one of the very first balls revealed a flaw that no amount of training could overcome: my lack of height.
There was some handy talent on the team including a big West Indian called Ken McLeod. Ken, who was 29 when I joined, had played first-class cricket for a solid five years in the 1980s, first with his home team, Jamaica, then with English side Lancashire in the year they made it to the county championship final. Now living in Canberra, he’d been playing for ANU for four or five years before I joined them. He could do some pretty good work as a right-handed batsman (I recall one match where he got five sixes in a score of 63 not out) but it was as a left-arm quick he really made his mark. Ken opened the bowling and one of the first shots he delivered was a bouncer that went clean over my head, well above my outstretched hands. ‘Ah gee
,’ he grumbled to our captain, Greg Irvine, ‘where’d you get this kid!’ That wasn’t the most comfortable feeling in the world, but I knew others on the team had faith in me so I didn’t dwell on it. I just tried to keep my head in the game, and got through the rest of the innings without too many problems.
Then it was our turn to bat. My forearm strength-building notwithstanding, I was unsurprisingly listed at number 11. Despite my excitement at being in the game, the longer the innings went on, the worse I felt. I tried to ignore it and tell myself it was just nerves, but that didn’t ring true. When I stopped to think about it I realised that as well as my limbs feeling heavier than usual, I was itching like crazy, especially on my upper half. I had a look under my shirt and saw I was starting to develop an angry rash across my chest. I quietly went over to Dad, who was sitting nearby, and told him about it. He took a quick look and said, ‘They’re sweat pimples. Go back over there and get ready to get on the field.’ I said, ‘Dad, are you sure? I feel pretty weird.’ He said, ‘Yes, it’s just a sweat rash. Time to focus now.’
Our number 9 got out and I was on. We needed 30 to win. The opposition team included a guy who had played at state level for South Australia and was known to be a bit of a hothead. He was fielding in slips and at one point he scooped up a ball I’d hit and as he went past me he said, ‘If I get a chance at you, young fella, I’m gunna knock your head off, I’m gunna make you wish that . . .’ I tuned out at this point.
Dad and I had talked a lot about the fact that blokes would undoubtedly try to intimidate me and agreed I just could not let it get to me. In fact if I wasn’t going to be able to let it roll off me like water off a duck’s back, he and Mum weren’t prepared to let me be in the team. Now, standing there and copping this stuff for real, I found I didn’t have to make any big pretence of not being bothered. I genuinely wasn’t thrown by what this hothead was saying. I let him finish then said, ‘Righto,’ and gave him a shrug that meant, What do you want me to say to you, mate? I’m here to play, so let’s play.
I didn’t end up getting a run, but much more importantly I didn’t get out. I was too small to whack away and take the game forward, but I could stand up to whatever came my way, so that’s what I did. I gutsed it and got behind the ball and wore a couple and in the end stayed out there long enough for my batting partner to get the runs we needed for victory. (Dad, who has seen me play hundreds, maybe thousands of matches over the years, says it’s still among his favourite innings.)
Things might not have gone exactly the way I’d have scripted them for the match — the rash turned out to be chicken pox and I ended up in bed for nearly a week afterwards — but it was a good start. I’d shown my team that I was there to compete and I’d shown my parents that I could handle the pressure. I’d also, inadvertently, shown myself that I could push on through even more discomfort and pain than I’d have guessed. I still felt pretty ordinary the following Saturday, but, with the doctor confirming I was no longer contagious, I was determined to get back out there. I felt keenly that every one of the first three games counted.
In reality I’d already done enough to convince Greg his intuition about me was correct, and recovering from chicken pox would have been an absolutely valid reason for missing a week. But even back then I never, ever wanted anyone to make allowances for me on the cricket field. There were to be no excuses, no reasons why I couldn’t deliver. From my first match on, I’d worked as hard as anyone on the team. I was determined to reward my teammates’ faith in me. I knew I had to earn my stripes, otherwise I was gone, and the only way to do that was to perform — so I did. They recognised that and respected it.
There would be plenty of memorable moments during my time with ANU but one that’s still vivid is my first dismissal, which was of a kind that’s rare at any level of the game. Ken bowled, the batsman took a swipe and missed and I caught the ball. That’s when things got interesting. In trying to have a go at it, the batsman had actually stepped out of his crease. Registering his lapse instantly, I rolled the ball onto the stumps and turned to the umpire with a big, ‘Howzat!’ The umpire signalled ‘out’ and both sides turned to look at me. The opposition looked both startled and annoyed, while my teammates just looked amazed. They started to compliment me on my match awareness in spotting the opportunity. I waved the comments away, saying as casually as I could manage, ‘Oh well, I just saw it and went for it. Now let’s get another.’ But inside I was feeling pretty great.
ANU had undertaken a big recruitment drive for that season, signing a number of new players, some of whom, like me, came from just across the ACT–NSW border. They included Simon Mann and Peter Solway. Peter was a mentor to me, helping me out in more ways than I can count. He also lived in Queanbeyan and drove me to training and matches, gave me bats and much more. He came from a wonderful family with very deep connections to cricket in general and in particular to the Queanbeyan Cricket Club, which he’d joined in 1980 as a 16-year-old. He’d played for Queanbeyan for 13 seasons before making the switch to ‘University’. There was an undercurrent of hostility whenever the two clubs went up against one another but one match really stands out in my memory.
It was a twilight game at the Queanbeyan ground. Mum took me to this one and the idea was for her to stay and watch for a while then leave. Dad would come by after work, catch the end of play and drive me home. But this day the aggression from the sidelines was particularly intense and it all seemed to be focused on me. The Queanbeyan supporters had a reputation for having some fairly hard men among them and they were going for it, calling me everything under the sun in the foulest language. At the mild end was, ‘You’re on the wrong field, sonny. You should be at the kiddies’ game. Where’s your mummy?’ Then it amped up to, ‘There’s the little traitor — g’arn, get him,’ and got worse from there.
It was so bad that when Mum realised what was happening she decided to stick around to keep an eye on me and, just as importantly, make sure Dad didn’t catch wind of it. She contacted him and told him not to bother coming; she was there and would stay and bring me home. He said no, that was fine, he was running a bit behind but he wanted to see some of the game and he wouldn’t be too much longer. Fearing the abuse I was copping was so bad it would send even my mild-tempered father over the edge, she tried again to talk him out of it without actually saying why. But Dad just said again he was happy to come by and he’d be there soon. I think Mum had a very tense time until Greg Irvine went over to the loudmouths. He said to the ringleader, ‘Oy, what do you think you’re doing? He’s just a kid. Calm it down.’ It seemed to work and fortunately by the time Dad arrived the sideline commentary had dropped back to the usual level of one-eyed barracking.
That was among the worst examples, but a fair bit of aggro came my way that entire season, one way and another. As I always did when something surprised or confused me, I talked it over with my father and took my cue from his unruffled reaction. I’d say, ‘Gee, Dad, you should have heard this guy today. He said this, this and this.’ Dad would say, ‘Well, you know why they’re doing it. They’re trying to win. You’re going to have to deal with that. If they’re directing all that energy into trying to put you off your game, you must be doing something right.’ That made sense to me.
My teammates were also there for me. They took what you might call direct action, especially when I was copping it from the opposition players rather than their supporters. Week in, week out, men from the teams we were playing against would stand over me, trying to intimidate me and get in my head. I just laughed it off, but every now and then it got a bit out of hand. The guys I was playing with appreciated the fact that I didn’t rise to the bait but, even so, most of them took a protective attitude towards me: I was their pet project, especially that first year. If they thought the opposition’s tactics had gone beyond gamesmanship into something nastier, they took it personally and did what they could to fix things.
Generally that meant making things uncomfortable for the
other side until they backed off a bit. If they didn’t back off, things got very uncomfortable indeed. There was one mouthy guy who couldn’t take a hint. He was batting and he just would not let up. It got so bad that I felt myself start to get rattled. Ken McLeod said in that wonderful West Indian accent, ‘Don’t you worry, Bradley, I’ll fix this,’ and he sent down a ball so fast that the batsman could barely see it, let alone play it. The bloke took a punt and moved one way, instantly realising his mistake when the ball connected with his hand — from memory, breaking his thumb. People tended to lay off if they knew you had that kind of support behind you. That is, of course, unless they were actually part of your own team.
Simon Mann, seven years older than me, was an absolutely lovely bloke off the field but an explosive cricketer. We put it down to him being a fiery redhead, but, whatever the explanation, he underwent a personality change between the change room and the pitch. And he didn’t discriminate: if he didn’t like what you were doing, you’d cop it from him, teammate or opposition alike. Looking back on some of his classic blow-ups, he once said to me with a shake of the head, ‘It really never bothered you, did it, when I was abusing one of the blokes on our team? Even if it was you, it never seemed to faze you. Other people would crack it but you’d just laugh or give me some cheeky comment back or say, “Shut up, Simon, and get on with your job” and that was that.’