Family grateful for RCH

Watching two-year-old Logan push himself along on a plastic tricycle inside his parent’s Warragul home, giggling as Paw Patrol plays in the background, one would never guess he has just spent more than a year in and out of the Royal Children’s Hospital for cancer treatment.

At just two and a half years old, Logan has endured 18 months of intense treatments, including chemotherapy, radiation, immunotherapy and a stem cell transplant to treat neuroblastoma - a rare form of cancer most often found in infants and young children.

August 27, 2021 was the date new parents, Alyssa Johnston and Shane Goldfinch, received their son’s diagnosis. They remember it well.

“As a parent, you know when something is not quite right,” Alyssa says.

“We went to quite a few doctors and he had viral symptoms, fever... and we were getting told he was dairy intolerant, he was gluten intolerant, all these random things.”

But one night when Shane was changing his son’s nappy that he noticed a lump forming on the side of his stomach.

When the pair rushed Logan to a local hospital it was initially thought he had some kind of intestinal blockage and he was sent to Monash Hospital, Clayton with lights and sirens. He had a temperature of more than 41 degrees.

At Monash, an ultrasound was performed by the same doctor that would eventually perform surgery on Logan.

“He pulled me aside and said, based on the stats, where it is in his tummy - the left side of the tummy near his left kidney - I think it’s neuroblastoma,” Shane explained.

The next day the couple met with an oncology team and were told Logan’s cancer appeared to be low risk and booked him in for a tumour biopsy, scans, marrow aspirates (sample of bone marrow from the pelvis) and a central line to reduce the trauma of having regular needles.

Logan had a 12-and-a-half centimetre tumour wrapped around his aorta, near his spine, and his left kidney, which was not functioning properly. A nuclear scan showed the cancer had spread through a lymph node and there were lesions on both of his femurs. At that stage, Logan’s cancer was upgraded to intermediate.

Logan quickly underwent his first cycle of chemotherapy at Monash Children’s Hospital while results of remaining tests were processed.

When Alyssa and Shane returned to Monash the following week it was immediately apparent to Shane that something was very wrong.

“I read the room straight away, there were two oncologists, nursing practitioners, there were social workers, a psych was in there.

“They got the proper biopsy results back a few days earlier... and it came back that he had two gene amplifications basically, that mutated inside the tumour.”

Logan had both the ALK gene and N-myc gene, meaning his prognosis was “extremely poor” and instead of the six months of chemotherapy initially planned, he would have to undergo “12 to 18 months of the most intense childhood cancer treatment out there.”

At the time he was receiving treatment there were still COVID-19 restrictions on hospital visits and Alyssa and Shane were rarely allowed to be in the same hospital room at the same time.

“It was really tough at the time,” Alyssa said. While Logan was receiving treatment at

Monash, the couple was provided with a room at the Ronald McDonald House in Clayton, and later, when he received treatment at the Royal Children’s Hospital they had a room in Parkville.

Logan’s tumour eventually shrunk from 12.5 centimetres to 2.7, and he was sent to RCH to harvest stem cells to be later used in stem cell therapy.

Scans revealed lesions on Logan’s femurs had disappeared and his tumour had shrunk to just 2.5 centimetres - doctors decided it was time to operate.

Logan underwent a six-and-a-half-hour surgery at Monash Children’s Hospital to remove the tumour and it was announced he was officially in remission. Medical staff were impressed by the little boy’s resilience and recovery time.

“He came out after surgery, he was yucky for 24 hours - two days later he was running around the ward,” Shane explained.

But, there was still more to be done at RCH. To reduce the likelihood of the cancer recurring, Logan was administered a high dose of chemotherapy at RCH and underwent radiation at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre.

He also received stem cell therapy at RCH, immunotherapy and had to be isolated in the bone marrow ward of the cancer wing in order to reduce the risk of infection.

Again, Logan impressed both medical staff and his parents with a quick recovery.

“On a Friday night one of the doctors said he had really bad infections in his mouth and was in lots of pain... but the doctor came in on the Monday afternoon and he was sitting up in his highchair eating a Vegemite sandwich,” Shane said.

Logan had major scans in January and February and has remained in remission. He will need to be monitored throughout his life but is a very lively and happy little boy.

“We’ve spoken to his doctors, and they said he is in the best position possible,” Shane said.

“He looks like a healthy little boy, and you wouldn’t know that anything’s happened.”

Alyssa and Shane are grateful to all the medical staff who helped them, and now understand how important supporting RCH is.

“The things that they can do that other hospitals can’t do - saved our child’s life,” Alyssa said.

“That’s why we feel that, with the Good Friday Appeal, it is so important for people to get behind it.”

“It’s strange, until you really go through something like this, I don’t think you really understand how important it is.”

Shane gave special thanks to the “phenomenal” nursing staff at RCH for their hard work on the wards, and agreed that it was important to support the Good Friday Appeal. “I can’t thank them enough,” he said.

The family recently participated in the annual Run for The Kids, and Logan walked an impressive four kilometres. Alyssa said the run was “very emotional” as many attending had close connections to the hospital.

Next year, they intend to travel to Sydney to participate in the Run2Cure Neuroblastoma.