“All I can say is that he’s a fighter.”
Eight-year-old Kieren Thomas-Thompson is finally back home in Mollymook after a year spent in Westmead Hospital fighting one of the rarest forms on brain cancers in the world- Rhabdomyosarcoma.
His father Warren said it’s been a very difficult year following Kieren’s diagnosis on June 24, 2015.
“He had an almost six hour operation and they told he he’d have a 50/50 chance of coming out of it,” he said.
“They said they can’t guarantee that he’d talk or walk again but three days later he turned around and said ‘mum I want Twisties’
“It scared the life out of her to be honest.”
After spending a month recovering from the surgery, Kieren underwent 23 days of straight radiation to the back of his skull before receiving a chemotherapy program that Warren said took an almost deadly toll on his young body.
“They said they can’t guarantee that he’d talk or walk again but three days later he turned around and said ‘mum I want Twisties’.
- -Warren Thomas-Thompson
“It’s the heaviest duty chemo you can have and it hit him hard,” he said.
“It nearly killed him in November, he had pneumonia and a nasty lung infection.
“They had to rush him to theatre and wash out of his lungs and he spent November and December in hospital, it was pretty hairy.”
The journey isn’t over for the family, who tragically lost another child to illness in 2004.
From here Kieren will undergo two more chemotherapy cycles and will need to travel to Westmead every three months for the next five years and while he’s responding well to treatment, Warren said there’s always the fear of the cancer returning.
“To put it bluntly, this form of cancer has an 80 per cent chance of coming back and if it comes back in the brain, we’ll have to say goodbye,” he said.
“We were at Ronald McDonald House for a year and in that time, three children were lost to this disease.”
The family thanked the community for their ongoing support, including Milton Public School and Ulladulla High School for their fundraising efforts. With mounting medical bills, including the 59 scripts they’ve received just this year, the family said any donations are much-appreciated.
For information on how to donate to the family, contact Milton Public School on 4455 1504.
