After months of treatment in Brisbane, four-year-old Manaia is now officially home in Cooktown, cancer-free. Photo: Supplied.
At just three years old, Cooktown’s Manaia was diagnosed with a rare childhood cancer in March.
After months of treatment away from home in Brisbane, mother Desiree Gibson said they were finally home and her baby cancer free.
“We’d been displaced in Brisbane the whole time; we’d not been cleared to return home for a weekend or anything like that,” she said.
“We’ve had to remain very close to the hospital, just because he is a child, and infections and all of that can come on very aggressively, very quickly.
“When you do get an infection or run a high temp or anything like that, it can be quite severe for kids going through chemotherapy, so it feels surreal to be back home in Cooktown.”
Like a script from every parent’s worst nightmare, a healthy and energetic Manaia called out one night after passing a “huge amount of blood in his urine”.
Suddenly diagnosed with a Wilms tumour, a childhood cancer that had taken over the majority of his left kidney, Manaia was transferred to Brisbane for surgery and chemotherapy.
“He’s finally able to be a kid again – he’s able to go on a playground, he’s able to swim, and do all of the things he wasn’t able to do with this diagnosis,” Ms Gibson said.
“He did have a port inserted, so there’s always that risk of infection when you play on playgrounds and swim in public.
“Even when we were living in a big city where those kinds of things are all around, he couldn’t, so it’s massive to just have him running around like a normal kid should, and living like any other four-year-old.”
Time away from home took a toll on the family, who were away from other family members, friends, a support network, and normality.
“When he was going through chemo, his appetite went down, and his mental health went down, just being away from home for such a long period of time,” she said.
“When everything was taken out – like he had a nasal feeding tube at one stage for a majority of his treatment, because he was so underweight – when all that lifted off him, there was a big difference.
“He’s now able to eat like he used to eat, and it’s been hard to watch as a mum, but he’s just back to himself.”
Moving forward, Manaia’s lifestyle will be strict, but he has been declared officially cancer free.
“He is now living with the one kidney, so we will have to be careful, but his doctor has given us the all-clear that there’s no more tumours and nothing else spreading,” Ms Gibson said.
“Now, we just return to Brisbane every three months just so that they can keep an eye on him, which is really great, because as a mum and dad back home in a remote community, we kind of don’t know what to look out for with the bad stuff.
“It’s really good for us to have that small timeframe to return back to his doctors, and if nothing flags with them over the three months within that one-year period, they’ll space it out to six months, and then that carries on for five to six years, just because he is at that high risk of reoccurrence over the next five years.”
Ms Gibson thanked the Cooktown community for getting them through the tough journey while the family was unable to work while supporting Manaia.
“It was massive; it was a huge weight lifted off our shoulders when we saw people reaching out from the very beginning wanting to help out,” she said.
“We were off work for pretty much this whole time, and I’m just so grateful for everything that everyone has done for us.
“I wish there as a way that we could give back to them, because it helped us so much.”
