A young Auckland mum struggles with a heartbreaking dilemma
The wreaths on Michelle Walker’s grave would be long gone by now and her three children would have spent several months mourning the loss of their precious mum. But this brave 28-year-old is still alive, despite being told in February 2007 that she had between three and eight months left to live.
Michelle, of Auckland, remembers the phone call from the hospital that gave her life a tragically short time-limit. “It’s what we hoped it wouldn’t be,” said the surgeon, who had carried out tests to check if the cancer he’d treated her for the previous year had come back.
“I thought,’oh no, more chemo!'” recalls Michelle, who was then aged 27. “But then he said, ‘I can’t fix you this time’. I said, ‘What do you mean? Am I dying?’ He told me, ‘In a nutshell, yes.’ I don’t remember much after that. I kind of lost the plot.”
Michelle had everything to live for. She had recently married her long-time partner Cecil, adored being a mother, and enjoyed her work as a bar manager. A couple of days after that phone call, she saw the doctor, who told her she had between three and eight months left.
“I wasn’t going to see Christmas, see my little girl turn four or possibly even have another birthday. That was it.”” But Michelle did get to celebrate both Christmas and her 28th birthday. And 14 months after being given the terrible news, she is still battling on.
She puts her incredible survival down to alternative medicine and a positive attitude. “I decided to fight,” she says, “and I’m not giving up.”
Michelle had been healthy until she was 26 and a lump on her inner thigh turned out to be a rare and nasty cancer called biphasic synovial sarcoma, which affects the soft tissues of the body. She had radiotherapy, then surgery to remove a tumour the size of a bread-and-butter plate, followed by six months of chemotherapy.
In July 2006 she was given the all-clear. But in February last year, a routine check led to the discovery of a lump in her pelvis. The cancer was now wrapped around a major artery in her groin and had got into her lymphatic system. It was incurable.
Michelle’s fighting spirit immediately kicked in. She got on the internet and googled “cancer cure”. Her research led to a change in diet – she stopped eating sugar and wheat and filled herself up with vegetables instead. She also investigated alternative cancer treatments. Three months passed, and she was still alive. But she hadn’t yet managed to tell her children, twins Carlos and Liam (then 8) and Angel (then 3), that they were going to lose their mum.
So she went on to the Tradeoe message board and put up the post, “How do you tell your kids you’re dying?” She was swamped with hundreds of responses and it became the most talked-about thread on the website. A newspaper ran an article about her and then TV one’s Close Up asked her to appear on the show.
Eight months had passed and she was still alive. Her courage and determination struck a chord with thousands of people watching the programme that night, including health researcher John Appleton, who offered to provide information on alternative therapies.
She sees a variety of therapists for regular treatments ranging from intravenous vitamin C to colonic irrigation. She’s taking a huge selection of nutritional supplements and is on a very strict diet – no sugar, wheat, dairy products, red meat or drinks apart from vegetable juice and filtered water. The cost of these treatments has been covered thanks to the generosity of the people who have donated to a charitable trust set up for her by John and athlete-turned-health-campaigner Allison Roe.
“I’m so very grateful because I couldn’t have paid the $3000 a month for treatments myself,” says Michelle. She adds, “I want to be the proof that alternative therapies do work. People say they give you false hope but there’s no such thing as false hope to a person with cancer. Hope is hope.”
She did eventually tell the children about her prognosis, one night at the dinner table. “one of the boys asked if I would have cancer forever, so I said it was a bad cancer, like their granddad’s who died, and that the doctors couldn’t help me anymore. My son said, ‘Will you miss us when you go to heaven?’ And I told him, ‘I don’t want to go, I love you’. And then I cried.”
At four, little Angel is still too young to understand what’s happening. And the fact she’s so young is one of the reasons Michelle is fighting so hard to live as long as she can. “I want her to be able to remember me.”
Michelle had to step up the fight last month after a routine chest x-ray showed she now has four tumours in her lungs. “At first I just went to bed and gave up. I didn’t get up, I didn’t eat. But after a couple of days I thought to myself, ‘Snap out of it.’ It’s hard to fight when it might be a losing battle, but if you aren’t fighting then you are waiting to die – and that’s harder.”
She has set herself small goals, such as being around for her wedding anniversary in June. “I have bigger goals too, like taking the kids to Disneyland. And of course I dream about seeing the kids grow up and get married, and seeing Cecil with grey hair and wrinkles.”
But she’s not unrealistic. She has prepared a memory box for her children, filled with photos and recollections for each of them. She has included responses from the Tradeoe post. “The doctors still say there’s nothing we can do and I know the prognosis is not good. But they haven’t dealt with Michelle Walker before. I’ve lasted longer than anyone thought I would, and I am going to keep going. Watch this space!” Donna Fleming
Want to help? Donations can be made to the Michelle Walker Trust at any branch of the ASB bank. The trust’s account number is 12 3026 0431582-00. Any money left over after Michelle has paid for her therapies will pay for treatment for another young mum, Bronwyn Whiting, who has terminal melanoma.
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