A new mother’s joy has turned into a ‘nightmare’ just 10 days after giving birth, with doctors revealing she has bone marrow cancer.
Taylor Johnston, 29, spent years battling fertility issues with her husband Jesse and the couple eventually turned to IVF treatment – which was successful.
Then on May, 19, following a marathon 25 hours in labour, she finally gave birth to her miracle baby Billie Mae.
But during the ‘scary’ ordeal, which ended in an emergency caesarean section and the loss of 1.7 litres of blood, midwives discovered a polyp in her cervix.
Tests results just 10 days later revealed the growth was cervical cancer.
The devastating diagnosis would only get worse with a series of MRI tests and PET scans, showing the disease had also spread to her bone barrow.
‘Not just any cancer, this is potentially terminal,’ Mr Johnston’s sister Lani Dorning wrote in a GoFundMe page she created for the struggling young Victorian family.
‘Their world stood still. Broken, heartbroken, shattered, numb. The air is sucked from your lungs. You can’t breathe.’
Mr Johnston has been unable to return to work as a carpenter as he takes care of his newborn and his wife undergoes debilitating treatment.
‘She is unable to have her baby by her side overnight whilst she goes through chemotherapy,’ Ms Dorning said.
‘Any mother’s worst nightmare. Just to hold her during the night. To smell her.. To feel her. The unknown.’
Under normal circumstances, doctors would rush to try and determine where the cancer originated in the body.
Although a cancerous growth was first located in her cervix, it is yet to be confirmed if that’s where it began.
Due to the severity of her case, lengthy testing to find out has been abandoned for immediate chemotherapy.
‘The doctors have decided that they’re basically going to stop looking for the primary cancer … They needed to start treatment,’ Mr Johnston told Yahoo News.
‘Bone marrow cancer can be pretty bad and it can be terminal, they basically said they don’t have that luxury of time to keep wasting days of testing.’
