A BEER SAVED MY

AFTER A RARE REACTION, THANKS TO GOOGLE AND A VIGILANT DOCTOR, AMY IS STILL HERE TODAY

hospital but, embarrassingly, by the time they arrived Amy says the pain had gone.

‘I felt so silly,’ she remembers. ‘I was breastfeeding my eightweek-old, so I felt a bit awkward even admitting to half a glass of beer and I didn’t think they’d take me very seriously.’

Incredibly, the triage doctor went above and beyond what most overworked medics would do, and his shocking findings went on to save Amy’s life.

‘He said he’d done some Google research and there were a couple of cases in the UK where a reaction to alcohol had been due to cancer,’ she says. ‘He told me there was a onein-four-million chance that was my problem, but he wanted to check it with a CT scan.’

With baby Indi in her arms and her husband beside her, the wait for the results was terrifying.

‘I had this bad feeling,’ Amy says. ‘I told Anthony to prepare himself. I really felt like this was it.’

But of course, having 10 minutes to prepare for the worst news of your life was never going to be enough and, when it came, Amy and Anthony were like rabbits caught in headlights.

‘He said I had Hodgkin’s lymphoma – the cancer had consumed my chest, breastbone, collarbones, heart sack and some of my lung. It had also entered my bone marrow,’ Amy explains. ‘I asked if I was going to die, but he couldn’t look at me and a nurse started crying. I think at that point, I only had months left.’

On holiday on the Sunshine Coast with her parents, daughter Indi and two-year-old son Kai, Amy was instructed to leave immediately and go to Brisbane hospital, where she needed to start treatment.

‘There wasn’t even time to go back to the apartment,’ she says.