Mary-Ann Riley, 52, faced more tragic news after her daughter’s terrifying battle with cancer
WORDS: JOHANNA BELL
As I watched my children Ryan, 30, and Maria, 27, laughing together around the table at a restaurant for Mother’s Day, I was in awe. Both so positive, despite being dealt such unlucky cards. Sometimes I ask myself, how can life be so cruel? How can such a deadly disease plague my family and threaten to take both of my children away from me?
But then I see how strong they both are, and their courage is truly inspiring.
Cancer first blighted our lives in 2007 when Maria was just 11. After suffering a terrible cough and tonsillitis symptoms, tests revealed she had acute myeloid leukaemia (AML).
‘Am I going to die?’ she asked, tearfully.
‘Not on my watch,’ I replied, hoping it was a promise I could keep.
After six months of chemo, Maria went into remission, so when she found a large lump in her breast just a few months later, we were terrified. She was still only a child, but a biopsy confirmed she’d relapsed, and that was when we learned she’d need a bone marrow transplant.
‘I’ll do it,’ Ryan, then 13, declared, after doctors explained that I wouldn’t be a good enough match. Even when he’d learned how painful the procedure would be, Ryan never faltered. ‘She’s my sister, I’ll do what it takes to save her,’ he’d said.
I was so proud of him.
When he woke up after the procedure he never complained about the bruises he was left with. He just wanted to sit with Maria, who by this point was bedridden. He sat with her for hours, willing her to get better as his donation was fed into her sleeping body via a drip. Maria spent six weeks in isolation following the transplant. Ryan stayed with my parents while me and their stepdad Marcus, 51, took turns to be at the hospital with Maria.
Though Maria responded well to the transplant, there were countless hospital visits and tests so we homeschooled her. She was mostly too tired to do much more than schoolwork. We took her out in her wheelchair whenever she felt up to it, but the highlight of her day was always seeing Ryan when he got home.
BACK AGAIN
We allowed ourselves to feel hopeful, but Maria caught a chest infection in April 2010, which developed into pneumonia.
‘It’s AML again,’ a doctor explained as she was hooked up to a ventilator. This time, the cells had collected in her lungs.
‘Why does it keep coming back?’ I wept.
