EARLY BIRTH NEEDED TO TREAT CANCER Hayley’s painful dilemma

A FIRST-TIME mum was faced with an unimaginable decision when she was told she needed to give birth prematurely to start cancer treatment.

Hayley Price was 32 weeks pregnant when she was told her daughter Emmy-lou needed to be delivered in order to start immediate treatment for stage four Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

The first-time mum initially thought she had a nasty flu she couldn’t shake.

“I thought I must be getting sick because my glands were a bit sore and a bit swollen, but I thought I’m pregnant so there’s nothing I can take anyway,” she said.

“But then one went hard so I went to the doctor for blood tests.

“It wasn’t until I went for a checkup for bub and they both came to a head at once.

“All my tests were sent to my obstetrician and she seemed worried about the blood results, but also bub was really small so I was made to have another scan and her stomach measure came under the second percentile, so it was too small.”

Ms Price and her husband run a cattle station in Dysart, nearly three hours west of Mackay, but after struggling to get an appointment with a haematologist the couple were sent to Townsville for specialist care.

“It was just growing rapidly; I had lumps in my neck and it had actually moved my wind pipe and I was struggling to breathe,” Ms Price said.

“We spent two weeks waiting for cultures to grow and testing them because I couldn’t get certain scans while pregnant.”

At just 32 weeks pregnant, Ms Price was delivered the news she dreaded most: she had stage four Hodgkin’s lymphoma and needed to give birth immediately to start treatment.

“It felt like the rug was ripped out from under me at the start of motherhood,” she said.

“I wasn’t able to breastfeed Emmy-lou and she had to be in special care, everything was just taken from me and there was nothing I could do about it.”

Almost five months on, the Price family have had to make a home at Leukaemia Foundation House next to the Townsville Hospital until chemotherapy treatment finishes in five weeks time.

Ms Price said despite the facilities and staff being as welcoming as possible, she would rather be closer to home.

“Mackay doesn’t have haematologists; they come from Townsville once a week so you can imagine how busy they are and I don’t know how much longer I would have had to wait,” she said.

“If there was nothing wrong with Emmy-lou when they thought she was going to be too small, I wouldn’t have been sent up here, yet we still would have been waiting.”

A Mackay Hospital spokeswoman said it was looking to increase haematology services to meet growing demand.

Approximately 35-40 patients are seen each week by a visiting haematologist.