Breaking his neck may well have saved Shaun Murphy’s life. The 25-year-old Auckland hairdresser was on his way to the supermarket with his mother Jillian when he suffered a massive seizure in 2015.
“It was terrifying,” recalls Jillian, a real estate agent. “He was thrashing around all over the place – I had to try and hold his arms down. It was lucky he still had his seat belt on because he would have been a terrible mess otherwise.”
She heard his neck snap “like something in a movie” and immediately pulled over to call 111. It was a moment of sheer terror for the mother-of-two, but she had been worrying about her son’s health for some time.
“We were just about living at the doctors,” she recalls of that time.
In late 2014, Shaun had been nauseous, couldn’t keep food down, and with a sore neck had been back and forth to his family GP for months. He even told his doctor he thought he had cancer.
“I was throwing up, I was achy and I’d lost something like six kilos in a week!”
Blood tests were ordered, but the results were inconclusive. There were murmurings about a bowel obstruction. By July, Shaun’s weight had plummeted to 59kg – “I’m 6’ 2” [1.87m], I weighed 114kg” – and he was still having severe neck pains.
He was admitted to Auckland City Hospital where he underwent more tests, including ultrasounds, a gastroscopy, colonoscopy, a liver biopsy and CT scans of his chest and abdomen.
Unable to discover a cause for his symptoms, he was discharged and then referred to the infectious diseases team. At this stage, Shaun says, he couldn’t turn over once he was in bed.
“Basically, once I’d gone to bed, I couldn’t move. If I ended up on my stomach face down, Mum would have to come in and roll me over.”
Then came the seizure that bought about a shock diagnosis.
Shaun remembers waking up in the ambulance in excruciating pain, unable to move his arms or legs. A scan revealed his C4 vertebrae was so damaged a break was almost inevitable. The decision was made to take bone from Shaun’s hip to fuse with a metal plate to repair his spine.
“When they were doing that operation, they realised it was cancer that had eaten away the vertebrae. They told me they had fixed the paralysis, but found cancer,” he says.
A bone marrow test found it was Langerhans cell histiocytosis (LCH), a rare disorder that occurs when the body produces too many of a particular white blood cell.
Shaun spent almost a month immobile in hospital with his mother and his sister Catherine (29), taking it in turns to be with him.
He chokes up as he describes his mother’s selflessness.
“The first night in hospital, the nurse told her she couldn’t sleep next to me. Mum said, ‘I am sleeping next to him every night, even if I have to sleep in a chair!’”
As his movement slowly returned, doctors suggested Shaun attend the spinal unit at Otara for rehabilitation, but he insisted on going home.
“I knew I was going to get my movement back,” he explains.
“I didn’t want others who were paralysed for life see that happen.”
Initially confined to a wheelchair, he graduated to a walking frame with the assistance of his family, friends and a physiotherapist. Catherine even quit her job to help out.
Over a period of 12 months, he was walking unaided. He has also just finished a round of chemotherapy.
As Jillian looks across at her son standing beneath a tree at their home, she is still clearly shell-shocked from the events of the last 18 months.
“The one message we want to get across is, if you’re worried about your health and know something’s not right, be persistent. Don’t give up. We were going to the GP, sometimes twice a week.”
Shaun adds, “The doctors at Auckland Hospital told me they’d only ever dealt with one other case of Langerhans. I hope that my story raises a bit more awareness around it. I’d hate anyone, especially a child, to go through what I have.”
Words: Julie Jacobson
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