by Brad Haddin
Dr Luce told us we should celebrate such good news, although he did have a sobering comment for us before we left. He said that with the chemo working the way it was, the neuroblastoma no longer posed such a direct threat to Mia’s life. The treatment was another matter. He repeated what he’d told us before: that in order to ensure they completely killed off the cancer and gave it as little chance of recurring as possible, the medical team needed to hit her system so hard that she might die from the cure rather than the disease. In the meantime, though, we’d had a victory, and we’d take any of those we could get.
We’d worked it out so that Mia would receive her fourth round of chemo and be back at home by Monday, 28 May, when the new baby was scheduled to be born by caesarean. On the morning of the big day we got the kids sorted out; then I had just enough time before Karina and I had to leave for the hospital to zip up to the shops for a few last things. I was about to load my basketful onto the checkout conveyer when the lady behind me held out the bottle of water she was buying and said, ‘Do you mind if I go first? I have my personal trainer waiting.’ I behaved the way I’d been brought up and said, ‘Go ahead,’ rather than what I was thinking, which was, I’ll see your personal trainer and raise you a three-year-old with an ear infection, a 19-month-old with cancer needing her feed and a pregnant wife who needs to be at hospital in less than 90 minutes to deliver.
We had planned to hire a specially trained day nurse to focus on Mia for the few days she would be at home while Karina was recovering from the birth, and, after lots of research, we settled on a well-qualified candidate who just happened to be male. When he arrived at the house for a trial run, Karina carefully and patiently explained everything to do with Mia’s medications, feeding routine, NG tube care and all the rest of it. She then went out to a medical appointment, at which point the bloke all but stopped paying attention to Mia and started following me around the house asking me cricket questions. His first day with us was his last. Instead, my mother stepped in and her sister Yvonne came from Cowra to help. They would look after Mia while Zac, who was on antibiotics for his ear infection, went to stay with Karina’s parents for a few days.
The trip to the Mater Hospital was shorter than to Westmead and we got there a little after noon. Everything went smoothly and at 5.30 p.m. our son was born, a healthy, beautiful boy who looked a lot like Zac did at birth. Despite everything that was going on, we were able to be completely in the moment and his arrival was every bit as special as those of his brother and sister in calmer times. We declined Zac’s suggested name — Honda — and went with Hugo Ross instead.
I’d been planning to duck back home to give Mia her medications just after 6 p.m. But, while Karina was generally well, it took a little while for her blood pressure to come down and she remained in the Recovery ward until 7.30 p.m., so instead I had to talk Mum through the process over the phone. At 9.30 p.m., with Karina and Hugo well settled, I started to drive home through pouring rain. I was only about 2 kilometres from the house when I took a call from Mum on the hands-free. Sounding really stressed, she asked if I was far away. Instantly on edge, I said, ‘No, why?’ She said, ‘Mia’s turned. She just got sick all of a sudden.’ I said, ‘I’m coming,’ and flew the rest of the way.
I ran in, fearing the worst. Mia was pale and limp, passing in and out of consciousness. Mum and Aunty Vonnie, very upset, explained that they’d done everything just as I had instructed but that Mia had become ill and then had vomited so violently that she had dislodged her NG tube. She looked terrible, and I was truly scared she might die. I picked up Mia and Mum and I raced out to the car and took off for Westmead. I was highly agitated, asking Mum over and over about what had happened. She was in tears as she told me she was sure she’d given the right medication in the right doses and the right order. All the while we were both trying to get Mia to stay awake.
We were rushed through Emergency, Mia was admitted and tests were quickly run, which showed that her haemoglobin level had dropped. While it wasn’t as low as it had been when she’d first been diagnosed, it was well below where it needed to be. In this case the cause wasn’t internal bleeding; it was the chemo killing off red blood cells. Mum and Aunty Vonnie hadn’t done anything wrong; it was just one of those things. The timing was, however, very unfortunate. Karina and I had only been away from Mia for nine hours, but that was by far the longest stretch since her initial admittance during which she hadn’t had at least one of us with her. No matter how much I tried to tell myself it was just a coincidence, and the same thing would have happened whether I was there with her or not, I was deeply shaken.
The doctors assured me that she would be much better following a blood transfusion, after which we would be taken down to a bed in the Camperdown ward. Sitting by her bedside in Emergency as that precious liquid went in, I was facing a window that opened onto the corridor. I could see some of the activity happening in a room diagonally across the hall with a lot of staff rushing in, although at first I was too busy focusing on Mia to take in what was happening there. There is so much background noise of beeps and buzzers in hospital that if you spend any time in there at all you automatically tune it out; however, one sound started to cut through, becoming louder by the second. It was a terrible howl that just kept going, and it was coming from the room across the hall.
Doctors and nurses now left the room, much more slowly than they had arrived. One of them was the nurse who was looking after Mia. Soon afterwards she came into our room to check on the transfusion. She looked as though she was holding back emotion. I said, ‘Did you just lose someone?’ and she nodded. A child had died metres away from us. Mere hours after hearing the lovely cry of my own newborn son for the first time, I was bearing witness to a mother’s heart-breaking cry of inconsolable pain. Every detail of that night will remain forever etched in my memory.
The dawn saw Mia restored to a healthy pinkness, sleeping peacefully. She was well enough to go home later that day, though she’d be back the following day for a clinic visit to check that her broken shoulder was continuing to heal. Karina and Hugo stayed in the Mater for five days. I don’t know how many women would regard the first days following birth as a relaxing break, but after two and a half months of snatched sleep and endless days in a children’s cancer ward, that’s exactly how Karina described this time.
The two of them came home on 2 June. Zac had already been in to the Mater to meet Hugo and had received presents from the new addition. (‘How did he get to the toy shop while he was still in Mummy’s tummy?’ He doesn’t miss a thing, that kid!) Mia, however, despite all the explanations in the build-up to the birth about what was going to happen, alternated between cuddling and kissing Hugo and clinging to me while looking at him suspiciously.
She had just over a week at home, with clinic visits every second day, then it was time for her next round of chemo — amazingly, we were by now up to the fifth cycle. More scans would be done after this cycle and then the surgery to remove the tumour could finally happen. Having seen her so well it was hard to see her knocked about badly by side-effects again, with one of the chemo drugs making her break out in hives within two minutes of it starting to hit her system and another making her blow up like the Michelin Man. But whatever symptom arose, the doctors continued to have something to counter it.
With Hugo coming along nicely and Mia progressing well, it was time for Karina and me to have a serious conversation about me returning to work. Every family that finds itself in a similar situation to the one we were in reaches the point where at least one parent has to go back to work, and we had reached it. My job, however, made our situation unusual. I couldn’t just phone up the HR department and agree on a date for my return. I had to be fit enough and playing well enough to be selected, whether at state or national level, or even in domestic Twenty20 competitions at home or abroad.
I’d continued to train in bits and pieces as best I could over the previous three months and I knew by everyday standards
I was still reasonably fit. But the standards required to play elite sport are very, very different and by those I was no longer even on the chart. It was ingrained in me to take care of myself in order to be able to push my body to its limit: the basics were getting enough sleep and making good nutritional choices. But sleep had become a rare and treasured thing and, as for food, at the hospital I’d often go a whole day without eating or just grab a vending machine snack because that was the option that would get me back to Mia’s room the quickest.
If you had asked me about my fitness before the day in the West Indies when I got that fateful call from Karina, I’d have told you with absolute certainty that at the age of 34 I still had years of top-level cricket left in me. But now? I wasn’t sure. As ever, there was only one way to find out.
Karina and I talked at length about my return to work. Without a doubt, it was going to be challenging, and we could only do it if we were in harmony. I’d still be there as much as I could for her and the children, but a great deal more of the burden would fall on her shoulders. She had to be okay with that, and she was. We also talked it over with both sets of parents. Our mothers were a key part of the plan: without one of them constantly available to be at the hospital with Mia or at home with Zac, we’d never be able to go ahead. Fortunately, they were fully supportive.
Even so, I think those weeks between Hugo’s birth and Mia’s 12 July surgery were some of the toughest Karina and I had during the whole experience. When Mia was home, we had all of her requirements to take care of plus newbie Hugo and Zac. We worked hard to make sure that Zac, as the one with the fewest demands, never felt neglected. They all woke up at different times throughout the night and our sleep deprivation just got worse and worse, putting a strain on both of us. Having someone else in the house all the time was also taking its toll and we had to have some awkward conversations with family members about boundaries. These discussions were extra painful because everyone involved cared for us deeply and was doing so much to try to help, but we were all living on our nerves 24/7.
The talented and dedicated surgeon who would be operating on Mia, Dr Gordon Thomas, warned us beforehand that he might have to remove one of her kidneys and wouldn’t know what else might need to come out until he opened her up. A kind and softly spoken man, he took care to make sure we knew as much as possible about what was going to happen, drawing us a picture of her anatomy in such detail it was like one from a textbook.
The operation took nearly six hours. Afterwards, Dr Thomas explained to us in his calm manner that he’d had to take out her right kidney and adrenal gland. He’d also had to scrape the tumour away from her diaphragm and liver. In all, it came away in 11 pieces. He said he’d taken an ‘aggressive’ approach to try to make sure no cancer was left to sneak its way into the lymphatic system. As expected, she was left with a large scar running down and across her abdomen. However, she recovered well, only needing two days in PICU, and amazed everyone with how quickly she was kicking her legs in the air and rolling herself around in the cot. Everything seemed to be going perfectly to plan.
That didn’t last long. Mia’s digestive system had shut down in response to the trauma of the surgery and the medical team warned us that it might take a number of weeks to start working again. In the meantime she was back on TPN feeding (her NG tube was still in and was being used to deliver medicine and remove the fluid that was building up in her stomach). When two weeks had gone by with no sign of things getting back to normal, she underwent a nuclear medicine Gastric Emptying Study, which confirmed that her stomach wasn’t processing what went into it and nothing was moving down into the intestines. The doctors said that while her stomach should ‘turn back on’ in four to six weeks, it wasn’t unknown for it to take up to three months for this to happen after such a big operation. But they also said it wouldn’t stop them pushing ahead with the sixth cycle of chemo.
Mia battled through the chemo. (I wondered how it was possible for someone who wasn’t eating in the normal way to vomit so much, the poor kid.) She then underwent more investigations for her stomach and Dr Thomas revised the time it might take for it to work again out to six months. He said the best tactic was to do nothing, just wait. That sounded unbelievable. Every time she developed a symptom they were immediately onto it, so why was this different? He explained that there was nothing ‘mechanically’ wrong; the problem was neurological. The nerves that controlled everything in her digestive system had had a major shock and had, in effect, taken the system offline.
What, we asked, would happen if they never came good? He said there were drastic steps that could be taken, including surgically implanting a percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy (PEG) tube, which carries food directly through the abdominal wall and into the stomach, but that would be a last resort and he felt confident that we wouldn’t need to get to that point. His instinct would eventually be proved right, but it’s perhaps just as well that we didn’t know how long it would take or what the consequences would be.
CHAPTER 8
FROM THE COMETS TO THE BLUES
AS A YOUNG MAN, my plans to move to Sydney after the Cricket Academy year ended were put on hold again thanks to another unexpected but perfectly timed opportunity, one that gave me the chance to make my professional List-A debut.
Australia’s domestic one-day series has been running since the end of the 1960s and it’s been through a lot of sponsorship name changes over the years. In 1997, the year I turned 20, it was known as the Mercantile Mutual Cup. Previously it had been run along similar lines to the Sheffield Shield four-day games competition where all six states fielded teams but neither of the territories did. However, in the lead-up to the 1997–98 season it was announced that the ACT would be invited to compete in the one-day comp for the first time, with the Canberra Comets going up against heavy-hitting state teams peppered with current World Cup and Test players.
I was selected for the Comets team along with other locals, including Peter Solway; my friend Mark Higgs, with whom I’d grown up; and Stuart Karppinen, then an up-and-coming bowler who had also been through the Academy. Two former international players were lured out of retirement to give the team more depth of experience: larger-than-life bowler Merv Hughes and batsman Mike Veletta. There was no contract, just fairly token match payments (though I also had a paid role with ACT Cricket going out to schools to promote the game). But money was beside the point because the experience itself was priceless. Lots of other young guys around my age were working hard to try to get a shot at a state Second XI team while I was in the right place at the right time to play on the national stage.
Nobody expected the Comets to perform very well. We didn’t have the big talent pools the states — even Tasmania — had to call on. But those low expectations were actually a really good thing. First of all, they fired us up — we were intent on making the most of the opportunity and showing everyone that the ACT deserved its place. Second, we were free to really go for it because there was nothing to lose and therefore no need to play conservatively. It was another big step up for me and the anticipation built and built in the lead-up to our first game, which came five weeks into the competition.
I was ultra-nervous as we prepared to walk out onto Manuka Oval the week after my 20th birthday to play a South Australian team that included Test and ODI opening batsman Greg Blewett. But outweighing my nervousness was my intense excitement at finally having the opportunity to pit myself against first-class cricketers.
The South Australian Redbacks batted first. The gap in experience and form revealed itself as Greg Blewett hit our bowlers around the park, reaching 97 before we could get him out. I took one catch in the innings, off the bowling of Higgsy, who was also making his debut at this level. (Tim Neilson was the batsman who nicked the ball and when I made my Test debut, many years later, Tim was coach of the Australian team. We built a close relationship and I joke with him to this day about the fact that he nicked balls way back when and he is still nicking
them to me in training 20 years later.) Higgsy also came in handy when I dislocated my finger during the innings, pulling it back into place for me before the physio could get out to the middle.
The Redbacks reached a total of 237. Our top order — Paul Evans, Mike Veletta and Peter Solway — all turned in solid performances but, coming in at number four, I only lasted two overs before getting caught for six. We ended up losing four wickets to run outs, and were all out for 226. So we lost . . . but only by 11 runs. It wasn’t a fairy-tale start by any means, but it was promising. Just getting out there and playing, instead of repeatedly imagining it, had done a lot to settle my nerves. I’d come out firing at bat, trying to shake things up. It hadn’t worked this time, but I knew it was the right strategy and the rest of the team backed me.
Two weeks later we had an away game to Tasmania. Their team was captained by David Boon, and included a promising young batsman, a few years older than me, by the name of Ricky Ponting. Bellerive Oval looks like a jewel box on television, but when you’re there it always feels like you’ve wandered into a giant fridge — those winds seem to come straight from Antarctica no matter how bright the sun’s shining. I was too fired up to care, though. This time we went out first and I’d moved down to six in the batting order. I stuck with my plan to go hard and I got 24 off 19 balls, including a six and a four, before I was caught. My strike rate was excellent; I just needed to stay in longer. Tasmania ended up beating us easily, taking the game by four wickets with plenty of play remaining. But every game made us stronger, and the following week it all came together perfectly.