ELLE’S CHOICE

In a case of history repeating itself, two years ago journalist Elle Halliwell was faced with the same decision her mother once had to make: put her own life first or that of her unborn baby? Here, she shares her story

A mother faces the worst decision – to risk her life or that of her unborn babe

I have always had a profound respect for words. In my career as a journalist I’ve seen politicians, billionaires and Aussie heroes brought to their knees with just a handful of prepositions, nouns and verbs. Words have power. I truly came to realise this on Thursday, April 28, 2016, when a single word tore my world apart. The day had started innocently enough. I was having a coffee at my desk, and at about 9.15am I realised I had a missed call. It was from the Royal Prince Alfred’s haematology department.

I wasn’t supposed to hear back from them for three weeks, once my doctor had received the results from some blood tests I’d had taken the day before.

“Ms Halliwell, we’ve got your test results sooner than anticipated, and an appointment has been made available for you first thing Monday morning,” the receptionist said. “We’re going to need you to come in, and please bring a family member or loved one with you.”

A loved one? People aren’t told to visit the doctor with a significant other unless it’s expected they’ll be in too much shock or distress to make their own way home.

As I hung up the phone, I’d suddenly lost the ability to breathe.

On the way home I called [my husband] Nick, and hearing his voice set me off again. “What’s wrong, Elle?” Nick shouted. “What’s happened? Are you OK? Where are you?“

“I think I’m really sick,” I managed to say. “The doctor wants us both to come in on Monday. They got my tests back already and I’m so scared.“

Fortunately Nick was self-employed at the time, so he was waiting at our front door when my taxi pulled up. As soon as I saw him I started to cry again, and he gave me a long hug.

He told me he had called our GP, Don “Doc” Munro, who is also one of our close friends, to see if he could find out what was going on.

Worst-case scenarios ran through my head as I lay on the couch, waiting for Doc to call back. Did I have a weird virus? Was it cancer? Maybe they’d mixed up my test results? Yes, that’s it – things like that happen all the time, I thought, desperately trying to calm my overactive mind.

DOC DELIVERS THE DIAGNOSIS I’D DREADED

It was approaching sunset when Nick took a call from Doc.

”Mate,” Doc said, “I’m going to come around in a few hours, once I’ve finished work. They’re going to call me back soon to tell me what’s going on.”

It was about 7pm when Doc buzzed at our door. Doc is anything but your average GP.

Doc is far from a bleeding heart, but I know that when he sat us down on our couch that night and told us I had a rare form of leukaemia, it was one of the toughest diagnoses he had ever had to give.

I can’t really remember much of what Doc said after uttering that awful word, leukaemia. A black shadow crowded out my vision until it felt as though I was watching him from inside a long, lightless tunnel.

Suddenly an image of my future self appeared in my mind: I was a pale mass of bones covered in a blanket of gossamer-thin, hairless flesh, lying in a hospital bed. Chronic myeloid leukaemia. That was the type of cancer I had; a slowly progressing cancer of the blood and bone marrow.

“If you’re going to get leukaemia, it’s one of the better types to have,” Doc said.

If I needed anything to cope with the shock, he explained, he could write me a prescription for alprazolam, aka Xanax. Then he got up, said goodbye, and left.

Nick was the first to break. It was soul-crushing to see my strong, eternally positive husband falling apart before my eyes, wailing as tears poured down his face.

“Not my beautiful girl. Why her?” Nick began shouting, over and over again as we held each other. I don’t know who he was directing the question to.

I couldn’t see a future anymore. Those grand plans of having a family and starting a new chapter together had vanished. My life had instantly been sucked into a vast, cancerous black hole.

I’d called my mum, Carrol, earlier that day to tell her about the call from the haematologist’s office, and promised to let her know if we managed to get more information before our appointment on Monday.

But now I didn’t want to call her. Mum lived in Brisbane, alone, and would be beyond devastated at the thought of not being close by to comfort me. “Mum?” I whispered when she picked up the phone. “What’s wrong, Elle? Did you find anything else out?” she asked quickly, the urgency creeping into her voice. It took me a few moments to get my voice to work. “I’ve got leukaemia,” I finally managed to say. The words felt thick and foreign on my tongue, like I was reading a script for the first time.

My identity had been ripped away in the space of a few seconds, and I hadn’t caught up to this new one that had been thrust upon me.

Physically I felt no different to the day before but, according to a blood test, this “new me” was sick, and cancerous.

ANOTHER LIFE-CHANGING REVELATION

On Saturday, two days after what I now refer to as D-Day – Diagnosis Day – I was lying on the couch barely able to move. I couldn’t stop recreating various scenarios in my head about my death, and what I would need to do when that time neared. I’d need a will drafted, I decided, and I’d have to write out a list to divvy up my designer shoes among my girlfriends.

Between these morbid thoughts, I tried to sleep. Maybe, I surmised, if I kept sleeping, I’d eventually wake up from this nightmare.

Why couldn’t I have gotten breast cancer, or some kind of malignant lump, I wondered. At least I could see it on an ultrasound, or feel it with my hand.

Instead, my leukaemia was like a phantom, an invisible entity I simply had to believe existed, based on a few numbers printed on an A4 piece of paper.

I couldn’t just get it cut out, removed with a scalpel, and have the hole sewn up nice and neatly. It was in my veins, my bones, my very DNA. I was cancer, and cancer was me.

Nick and I were pretending to watch a movie that afternoon, both of us silently contemplating my bleak future as we stared at the TV.

I started thinking about our dream of starting a family later that year. We hadn’t exactly been careful with contraception, but I had taken a pregnancy test two weeks prior that had come back negative.

Nick had been just as excited as me about having a baby in the not-too-distant future. We’d travelled, partied and done all of the things any newly married couple should have done before parenthood. But my diagnosis had ripped this away from him. If I did survive this disease, neither of us knew whether my fertility would be affected or not.

I’ll never know what prompted me to take the spare Clearblue [pregnancy] test sitting on top of the fridge that Saturday. I actually forgot to check it after I’d gone to the toilet and peed on the little stick. It was about an hour later that I finally remembered to check it.

It took my brain a moment to catch up to my eyes when I looked at the small display panel on the plastic stick. I was reading it but struggled to comprehend the two words and two numbers it showed, despite their clear, bold font. Pregnant. Three-four weeks it read. F---.

This is an edited extract from A Mother’s

Choice by Elle Halliwell (Allen & Unwin) $29.99 out now