north east regional extra | June 8 - 14, 2022
nemedia.com.au
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June 8 - 14, 2022
By GRAHAM CLEMENTS
WHEN Kristy McMahon’s daughter Ella was diagnosed with Osteosarcoma (bone cancer) her family was torn from its routine of work and school, and cast into the unknown. Ella was diagnosed on a Friday afternoon. “By 7am the following Tuesday morning my husband, Matt, and I had both told our employers we would be gone for an unknown amount of time, Ella and her brother were both pulled out of school, the car was packed and we were on our way to Melbourne,” Kristy said. “We didn’t know where we were going to stay, how long we’d be there or anything else. “We had initially planned to live at Ronald McDonald House and send our younger son, Rory, to school near the hospital, but we quickly established that city and hospital life wasn’t going to work. “Our seven year-old country boy was used to peddling his bike down the middle of dirt roads and resented the iron grip of his parents preventing him from being cleaned up by cars on Flemington Road. “He vomited from anxiety almost every time he came into the hospital and saw his sister hooked up to chemotherapy bags. “He struggled with our inability to provide him with routine, familiar surroundings and home cooked meals.” So Matt took Rory home and Kristy stayed at the hospital with Ella. Each week they would swap, meeting briefly on the side of the Hume Highway, as one parent needed to hurry to the hospital while the other needed to be home before school finished. “In the year after Ella’s diagnosis we travelled more than 30,000 kilometres up and down the Hume Freeway to the Royal Children’s Hospital and back,” Kristy said. “The State Government provides financial assistance for travel but the paperwork was so extensive we never claimed it in the first year.
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Spreading hope ◆ OFF TO CAMP: Kristy McMahon preparing to send her children Ella and Rory to “Time Out for Life” camp .
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YOUR GARDEN EN
ANIMAL CARE
WINE TALK
YOUR HEALTH
TECH & SCIENCE CE
with HELEN
with ROO
with ANITA
with SOPHIE
with CHRIS
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