My Family's Keeper

by Brad Haddin

  CHAPTER 14

  COMING BACK AND COMING HOME

  BY THE END OF July 2012, it felt as if years, not months, had passed since I’d picked up the phone in that Caribbean hotel room and learned Mia had cancer. For decades I’d focused intensely on cricket, but during that call its importance faded away and it continued to mean little in the chaotic period after her diagnosis.

  However, by late July our little girl had come a long way. She’d made it through five of her six chemo cycles and she’d survived the complicated and dangerous six-hour surgery to remove her tumour and one of her kidneys. By most measures, Mia was recovering brilliantly from the operation, looking well and happy and moving around freely despite the huge scar on her abdomen. The one thing troubling us and her doctors was that her digestive system had still shown no signs of getting back into gear.

  Mia’s surgeon, Dr Thomas, continued to reassure us, saying he was confident things would return to normal . . . eventually. The analogy that made the most sense to me was that Mia’s stomach was reacting similarly to a person who’d been punched. He said, ‘You know how if you’ve been hit you tense up and stay tensed up waiting for the next blow to land, and it’s only when you’re finally convinced it’s not coming that you start relaxing? Well, it’s like that. We had to be so aggressive to make sure we got every tiny bit of the tumour that the stomach has tensed up. Eventually it will realise that the attack is over and start working again. We just have to wait.’

  The stomach issue wasn’t a problem in terms of nutrition; the total parenteral nutrition (TPN) ensured that Mia was getting a precise balance of everything she needed in fluid form, delivered directly into her veins through her central line. (The NG tube, which still ran in through her nose and down the back of her throat to her stomach, was used both to deliver medications and to aspirate the stomach, removing the fluid that continued to build up there.) It’s true that long-term TPN use can cause complications, including liver damage, but Mia was being monitored carefully to guard against that. No, the real problem was that if she wasn’t eating she couldn’t be discharged and could only be away from the hospital on a gate pass.

  The next scheduled stage of treatment was the final chemo cycle, followed by the bone marrow transplant, or BMT. The medical team delayed starting on this, waiting to see some progress in her digestion. We often ate in front of her, hoping it would spark her interest, and always offered her food too. Everyone got seriously excited the day she gave a little lick at the icing on a cupcake, but it didn’t lead anywhere. A week or two later she nibbled at a couple of hot chips and once again we were briefly thrilled. But there was no progress beyond these occasional flickers.

  With the six cycles of chemo completed and treatment not going anywhere fast due to the feeding issues, Karina and I talked in depth about the need for me to return to work, whether it was cricket or something else. There was no question in my mind that I still had the skills to play the game at the highest level. But did I really want to do everything it would take to get back to the top?

  Even after months away from the game I was extremely fit compared to the average bloke. But, having played professionally for 15 years, I knew how far off I was. Bowlers love to joke that wicketkeepers are the short, fat fellows who are put behind the stumps because they can’t do anything else. The reality is that skin-fold tests, databases of reaction times, minute-by-minute training records and detailed daily health diaries are a given for every member of the Australian cricket team, as they are for elite athletes in most sports. I knew what it would take to get myself back into the required shape — and how much it would hurt. With Mia’s life still hanging in the balance, what I didn’t know was whether I had the will to put myself through that.

  My first step was to talk to Christian, who’d come to know me very well over the years I’d been training with him. I told him what was on my mind, including the fact that because I was still doing overnights at the hospital and spending many daytime hours there, my availability to train would be erratic. He was totally supportive, offering to work around me. True to his word, he met me whenever I could fit in a session, whether it was 9.30 at night or 4.30 in the morning.

  He worked me hard and offered endless encouragement, but he also recognised when I needed to talk more than I needed to box. Like Dad, Christian was a great sounding board. There were times when I would turn up after an especially rough night or at the end of a bad day. I’d be hitting walls, full of fear and anxiety that I didn’t want to lay on Karina, who already had so much to deal with. I’d say to Christian I was ready to train and he’d look at me and say, ‘Uh-huh. How about we get a coffee instead?’ Initially I’d say, ‘No, I’m right.’ But he would see I wasn’t, so he’d sit me down for coffee and listen while I got it all off my chest, then send me back into the fray in a much better frame of mind. It wasn’t long before I felt the old familiar feelings of wanting to push myself and be pushed even harder.

  The previous summer, in addition to my commitments to the national team and the Blues, I’d played in the inaugural season of the Big Bash League, signing on as founding captain of the Sydney Sixers. Among the other players were Mitchell Starc, Steve Smith, Brett Lee, Stuart MacGill, Moises Henriques and a couple of overseas signings, including West Indian Dwayne Bravo. Trevor Bayliss, newly back from Sri Lanka, was coach. The Twenty20 season is short and sharp, just six weeks from mid-December to the finals in late January, and it’s a lot of fun. It’s definitely still very competitive, but without the pressure of the other forms of the game. The Sixers had a great first season, topped off with a win in the final against the Perth Scorchers. As national winners we’d qualified for the Champions League Twenty20 competition to be held in South Africa in October. With Karina’s encouragement, I accepted the Sixers’ offer of a contract for the coming season; however, I was upfront about the fact that I didn’t know whether I’d be able to go to South Africa and wouldn’t be able to make that call until close to the departure date in October.

  I also told the Blues I’d be available for the upcoming season. It was going to be a try-it-and-see situation: Karina and I didn’t know how Mia’s treatment would go or how we’d all handle the fact that I’d have to travel interstate, but we felt that we could make it work. Cricket Australia continued to be supportive. I stayed in touch with team performance general manager Pat Howard, being completely upfront with him concerning my uncertainty about if and when I’d be available for the national team again, and my plan to test the waters by playing with NSW. He reinforced the fact that everyone at CA was behind me and whatever decision I made.

  I wish I could say my experience with Cricket NSW was the same. Despite my deep roots with the Blues, no-one from management got in touch after Mia’s diagnosis to check in on me or wish us well. Plenty of individual players and support staff did, but from the organisation as a whole there was nothing. I wasn’t surprised; it coincided with the views I’d formed of a couple of the key people. (No-one who had anything to do with the Blues was surprised when it all came to a head 18 months later, leading to a long-overdue regime change.) When I let the Blues management know I was ready to play again, I wasn’t counting on much help from them. I didn’t need it; all I wanted was to get out there on the pitch and perform. The first step would be the pre-season training camp, followed by a couple of trial games leading into the season proper. There’d be nothing half-hearted about it. If I was going back, I was going to do everything needed and more. So as well as continuing to work with Christian, I called on Tom Carter.

  Tom happens to be one of my closest mates, but he’s also one of the country’s best and toughest high-performance trainers. I told him that I didn’t want to return to playing in anything less than my best possible condition. I asked him to strip me down and help rebuild me as an athlete. Before he became an exercise scientist and elite trainer, Tom spent 10 years playing professional rugby union with the Waratahs and was capped 85 times. So he knows about pushing hu
man biology to its very limits, he knows about pain and he knows what can be achieved if the mind refuses to listen when the body cries out that it has nothing left to give. I trusted him completely.

  He wrote a training program that started out at incredibly demanding and ramped up from there. A lot of what we focused on was getting power through the legs, which is essential for a wicketkeeper. We did a lot of working the legs separately to ensure I could take a catch pushing off one-legged and land without straining a knee. He had me doing everything from gymnastics to strength work. He’s based at Sydney University, which, despite being in the heart of Sydney, has beautifully lush ovals — all the better for torturing people. One of his favourite drills was getting me to put a stretch-band around my legs and then walk round the entire oval in a crouch position. My reward for finishing was to do it again backwards. The aim was to build up all the power I could possibly need in my glutes and legs.

  I was feeling strong, but just days before I was due to return to training with the Blues I came down with a gastro bug, one of those crook-at-both-ends viruses. I couldn’t take the chance of passing it on to Karina or the boys, who might then pass it on to Mia, so I took myself off to a nearby motel for a couple of nights, where I wore a track between the bed and the bathroom. I was still as sick as a dog on the morning of my first training session. I had a choice. I could turn up, explain the state I was in and excuse myself from the on-field work, or I could dig deep and get through it. In deciding to come back to the game I’d vowed to myself I was never, ever going to use what Mia was going through as an excuse for anything. By the same token, I wasn’t going to use this. No excuses, now or in the future. I might have had a small mental groan at the news that we were starting with six fast one-kilometre runs but I didn’t let my reaction show. I told myself it was 50 minutes of pain that I needed to push through, and I did.

  It was interesting coming back to the Blues and seeing parallels with the way things had been when I was with them earlier, except this time from the other side of the fence. In the absence of the international players (including Michael Clarke), they were a young group with inexperienced leadership, and struggling a bit. A lot of them didn’t realise how big a gap there was between the effort they were putting in and the level they’d have to reach to even be considered to play for Australia. I’ve always been pretty good at cutting out the stuff that didn’t matter, but what we were going through with Mia distilled things to their essence and left me with no tolerance for crap. I was there to work and I didn’t have time to waste.

  It was a point of pride for me that no matter how bad things were in the hospital or how little sleep I got, I was never late for a NSW training session and always gave it everything I had. However, there were some rules I couldn’t follow. We had a phone app into which we were required to enter our stats each day: how much sleep we’d had, what training we’d done and how we’d performed. The aim was to allow the trainers and coaches to tailor our programs to get the best out of us. I knew there was no way I could put in my real figures or I wouldn’t be passed to play. I told the Blues’ trainer Paul Chapman that I couldn’t do it and explained why, saying, ‘My situation is that I can’t always get eight hours’ sleep, or even six. If you read my numbers and see that I’ve only had one or two hours the night before a game, you’re going to judge me on that; you won’t be able to help it. But I only want to be judged on how I play.’ He could have made things difficult, but he totally understood and had faith in the fact that if I wasn’t fit to play I’d say so. He said, ‘That’s fine. I know you. I’ll watch you when you train and make my decisions on that.’

  There were a few comments from other Blues players about how much training had ramped up since my return but, even so, I didn’t feel that it was pushing me anywhere near as hard as I needed, so I continued to work with Tom and Christian. My goal was to be in top form by mid-August when Cricket Australia’s annual preseason camp was to take place in Darwin. It would be the first time most of my teammates and the coaches and selectors would have seen me since Mia got sick. I was determined to perform at the highest level so no-one could look at me, see something sub-par and ‘make an allowance’ because of what my family was going through. I couldn’t stomach that idea.

  All the hard work paid off. By the time the camp started, I was as fit as I’d ever been — among other feats, I could jump 1.5 metres in the air from a standing start. There was no awkwardness about being back in that environment, just the opposite: it felt really good to be with guys like Ricky Ponting, Mitchell Johnson and Peter Siddle again. But I was on a mission to show that I was still one of the best players in the country. I didn’t talk about it; I let my actions speak for me. On the second day, after we’d been through a battery of different tests, Justin Langer, who was the team’s batting coach, looked at me and said, ‘You’re back, aren’t you?’ Justin is one of the proudest guys ever to wear the Baggy Green. He understood what it had taken to get to that moment. We exchanged nods and got back to it. My next goal was to make sure I was peaking by the start of the Blues’ season.

  Back in Sydney, Mia’s stomach still wasn’t working. Her medical team decided they’d waited long enough; it was time to go ahead with the treatment. On 20 August, Karina and I met with the BMT team to talk through the process in detail. The doctors were kind and compassionate, but a lot of what they had to say was very hard to listen to. They had the results from scans done after Mia’s surgery which bore the magical letters ‘NED’ — No Evidence of Disease. That was exactly the result they’d been hoping for (and it was testament to Dr Thomas’s surgical skills). But, they told us gently, the form of neuroblastoma Mia had was so aggressive that if the threat it posed was an iceberg, all the treatment so far had only dealt with the tip.

  They now had to do everything possible to try to make sure it had no way to come back. The BMT would help by putting healthy stem cells — taken from Mia in April — back into her body to form new, strong bone marrow. But before she could have the transplant she had to be given an extremely high-dose chemo cycle that would ‘make room’ for the new marrow by killing off all her existing bone marrow and — with it — any lurking cancer cells. This would make her vulnerable to any infection with which she came into contact: she would have literally no immunity. In order to save her life, they had to all but kill her first.

  They explained that Mia would be at very, very high risk for four to six weeks after the procedure, during which time she would remain in isolation in a specially prepared room on the Camperdown ward. She would then continue to be at a degree of risk for a whole year while her immune system built back up to full capacity. During that time she couldn’t go to shopping centres or anywhere else where there were large groups of people. She couldn’t go to friends’ birthday parties or mothers’-group get-togethers. We couldn’t have anyone over to visit who had any sign of illness. And everyone in contact with her had to carefully guard their hygiene.

  As well as the infection risk, for two to three weeks after the transplant she would feel extremely nauseated and unwell. She was at risk of complications that can be fatal for BMT recipients, including respiratory failure and something called veno-occlusive disease, or VOD, whereby the liver stops functioning properly because of blockages in the tiny blood vessels. If one organ failed there was a chance others might follow, leading to fatal multisystem organ failure. It was horrible to think about what could go wrong. All we could do was hope she got lucky. As risky as the procedure was, it was an even greater risk to do nothing.

  Because chemo can cause hearing loss and sight difficulties, Mia had been tested in these areas before treatment began. Re-testing her now showed that while her sight was fine, she had been left with mild to moderate hearing loss and there was the chance this might be made worse by the high-dose chemo. The tumours had gone from her arms and legs but had left behind weakened, aching bones. She was nauseated a lot of the time. For the first time, she had now started to dislike
hospital, and she hated having to go back to her room after a visit outside to the playground. As well, the Clown Doctors now made her cry and we had to quickly wave them away if they came to the door. She’d also begun to get cranky with nurses she didn’t like.

  The chemo was scheduled to be delivered over the course of a week that coincided with the NSW Blues’ pre-season training camp. I really wasn’t sure about going away, but Karina assured me that she would be fine, and had both our mothers, her sister Danielle and her aunts Robyn and Judy lined up to help. Our sister-in-law Amy would also be arriving, bringing her young daughter Molly on a visit from Dubai. Even so, I found it hard to go. I stayed with Mia at hospital the night before the flight and when it was time to leave I didn’t want to stop cuddling her. Compared to the worst times during the five months since diagnosis, she was doing well. When her pain was under control, she was lively and cheeky and happy; her cheeks were pink and her eyes sparkled. I knew she wouldn’t look like that when I got back a week later.

  Mia was never out of my mind when I was at camp, but I forced myself to focus on what I needed to do. If I was going to be away from my little girl, every minute had to count, so I’d paid for Christian to travel to the camp and stay in the same hotel as us. Before breakfast and at the end of a day of training or playing in a trial game, when the younger guys were relaxing, I worked with him, boxing or doing some other preparation for my first real game back. Despite that, one of the people charged with overseeing the team said to Michael Clarke, ‘Do you reckon Brad’s in the right headspace to play?’ To his credit, Michael said something to the effect of, ‘Don’t go behind his back; ask him yourself. He’s a professional and he knows where he’s at. He’s never been anything but a straight shooter. If he doesn’t want to be here he’ll tell you.’ That speculation about my readiness to play was completely unhelpful and unnecessary. Unfortunately, though, this bloke wasn’t alone in trying to second-guess how I was feeling or what was best for my family. It would happen far too often over the next few years and I hated it.