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THAT PAST, OF COURSE, IS ALL PART OF ME, BUT I WANT MOST TO BE DEFINED BY WHAT I AM STILL TO BECOME .
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Back in Peter Mac and getting hooked up for a week of chemotherapy treatment.
While undergoing chemotherapy treatment at Peter Mac several patients, including Ivy, were chosen to attend a three-course lunch made by MoVida owner and executive chef Frank Camorra.
one of the journos was about to start maternity leave,” Ivy said.
Recovery was gradual but complete and she has no lingering issues today.
“I got the job and started on my birthday. Four months later I was pregnant too,” she laughed.
But for this vivacious young mother and journalist it was just the beginning of the descent into a personal nightmare.
Ivy admits to a 'slightly' controlling approach and loves being in charge so when she was hit with post-natal depression it hit hard.
In 2009 she was pregnant again but at 10 weeks she and husband Jace separated.
And hardest of all was the realisation things can happen to you over which you have no control, something she found very difficult to accept. “The key is getting help, and getting it quickly — it was a tough lesson and one I have never forgotten,” she said. One of the recommendations was she take a holiday which she did, in style — an African safari with husband Jace and her in-laws Veronica and Geoff Wise. Her time off meant a lot of flying — including Mt Isa and back (twice) to drop baby Ayla off to her grandparents there and then long-haul to Africa, and back — and within weeks she was cut down by a stroke, caused doctors said, by a DVT in her leg from the flights. “It was so sudden, I had just walked home and felt a little funny and lay down — and fell straight off the couch, then started staggering and vomiting,” Ivy said.
Ivy said her depression and her illness had put a lot of strain on their relationship. “It was hell, pure and simply hell, at times I think the only thing that kept me alive, from doing something stupid, was Maya, who was born in June the next year,” she admitted. “In 2011 I felt ill again but when the doctor ordered a biopsy and then told me it confirmed I had cancer I just went into shock. “Could anything else possibly go wrong?” The best medical opinion at the time recommended chemotherapy and radiation rather than surgery but for Ivy the crushing diagnosis was almost too much to cope with, especially when she realised treatment on this scale would mean no more children. “It was all just so much to get my head around, such big decisions to make, I panicked about my girls, I panicked that I might not be here for them.” And then it got worse. The biopsy had triggered a major internal bleed and there was no delaying any thinking about harvesting and freezing eggs, or even planning how to approach the looming treatment.
“At first the doctors said I had gastro but two days later I was still bedridden so the doctor ordered a CT scan — it showed a shadow on my brain which they said was the stroke and I was in the Royal Melbourne within hours,” “It just all got away from me, if I thought the she said. depression was bad this was insane, it all just happened so fast, I think I almost went “The scan also revealed I had a small hole in into denial.” my heart since birth,” she said. She was given blood thinners, kept in hospital for a few more days and nine months later, using keyhole surgery, the hole was also repaired.
Debilitated by her treatment, undergoing massive weight loss, Ivy struggled on — her children stayed with their father during the week and she took them back, exhausted as she was, at weekends. She was boosted by friends who set up a fundraiser and raised thousands of dollars to help meet her costs as she was unable to keep working. But a cornerstone of Ivy's recovery was the friendship and support of her former in-laws without whom she said she would have runaway back to her family in Queensland. “I had so many good friends here, I loved my job at the Riv and the girls had their father here, but without Veronica and Geoff I could not have done it,” she said. As punishing as the treatment was, it worked. In 2016 Ivy got the five-year all clear. Moving around the world, bullied, a new language (she only has a few words of Danish now), marriage, depression, a stroke, heart surgery, divorce, cancer, and still in her 30s. Life has been an unbelievable rollercoaster for Ivy but in the long run it has not stopped her, or dulled her thirst for the future. She still dreams of more travel, of maybe living in New York for a while, and down the track writing books. And performing on stage with EchucaMoama Theatre Company, which she loves. Mostly though, she does not want to be defined by what has happened to her, she wants to be able to show her girls that she can do anything she wants — and so can they.
For eight weeks this single mother would drive from Echuca-Moama to Peter Mac in “That past, of course, is all part of me, but I Melbourne and receive her cancer treat- want most to be defined by what I am still ment and then drive herself home on Friday. to become.”
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