It was April 2015 and Shelley Woodney’s 43rd birthday. The Pakuranga mum-of-three had been out with friends for drinks, but hadn’t felt much like celebrating. Her gums ached.
Two days later, still with a sore mouth and thinking she had tonsillitis, she asked her mother to take her to her local after-hours emergency centre. The nurse took one look at Shelley and sent her to hospital.
After what she thought were just routine tests she was told she had leukaemia – more specifically acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, a blood cancer caused by the abnormal division of bone marrow stem cells.
“To be honest, when they told me I had leukaemia I didn’t believe them. I don’t recall too much of what was said except that I had an aggressive cancer and unless I started chemotherapy straight away I only had weeks to live.”
Shelley credits her children Harry, Madi and Josh, – and her young donor – with keeping her alive.
She was also told she’d need a stem cell transplant. For someone who had, in her own words, “always been the life of the party,” the diagnosis was devastating.
Shelley was so ill, she had to quit her job – she’d just retrained as a nurse. She also decided to end her new relationship and, devastatingly, had to give away her beloved nine-month-old black Labrador.
Her children Josh (21), Madi (20) and Harry (16) set up a fundraising page to help pay the bills and medical expenses.
“I had no health insurance and no mortgage protection insurance,” she shrugs.
“We’d just come out of a crisis with my son’s girlfriend – she had influenza and was on life support for six weeks – and then this was thrown at us. Suddenly everything was different. My daughter planned to move to Melbourne and my parents were going to move to Nelson in their motorhome… that all went on hold.”
She recorded her battle with lymphoblastic leukaemia in a poignant Facebook blog.
First, there was the chemotherapy – four rounds, once a week, every four weeks. Anything that could go wrong did. The second round sent her into an anaphylactic shock, she was always nauseous and had an almost permanent headache.
“People talk about life with cancer as being the new normal. But it’s not. Your whole world changes. Here I was, the person who helped other people, who other people depended on, suddenly becoming dependent. My life of Friday night drinks with the girls, travelling, working, dancing was replaced by chemo, lumbar punctures, biopsies, blood transfusions and too-many-to-count hospital admissions.”
Shelley’s best prospect for stem cells was a sibling, but neither her brother, Chris, nor sister Julie, matched. She remembers a call from Julie who was crying uncontrollably: “All she could say was she was so sorry she couldn’t help me.”
Eventually a donor was found through the international registry – a 19-year-old male from Germany, who Shelley now regards as her “adopted son” – and in August, four months after the initial diagnosis, she underwent a transfusion. At one stage, her family were called in to say goodbye.
Shelley recorded her harrowing journey in a Facebook blog. It is a poignant read, not least because she is now battling graft versus host disease, which means the new host cells are attacking her own tissue.
“I’d been given a journal from the Leukaemia Foundation, who suggested writing things down and that’s what my blog turned into – a journal.”
Photographs show her with tufts of hair, no hair, tubes in her nose, needles in her arm and an ulcerated mouth.
“It was my reality. I lost my partner, my dog, my dignity. And I lost friends, they just couldn’t deal with it. When you are unwell it’s those people who bear the brunt. Your illness takes over your life and the lives of everyone around you.
“I would never have said I was a real mum-type mum, but I put everything down to my kids. They kept me alive.”
She’s also learned the power of being truthful, something she found difficult when first writing her blog.
“Yes, you can take every day as it comes and yes, every day I am grateful to be alive, but you’re pushed to your absolute limits. I’m still struggling with it. I wake up sore every day. Not being able to just go to the supermarket, being exhausted, just being tired of the pain, it’s all there.”
Despite that, however, Shelley says she can’t thank everyone, including her young donor, enough: “It was such a selfless act and it gave me life. When I was writing the blog I had huge support. I thought my day was bad and then someone with terminal cancer would tell me about how I’d helped them. The kindness of strangers still blows me away.”
While she’s still on a diet of steroids and painkillers, Shelley is now in remission, back at work three days a week, and doing her best to move forward.
Words: Julie Jacobsen
