Nicky lives on a farm in rural Western Australia, with her husband Les, her daughter Jess, her stepchildren Brianna and Riley, and their son they have together, Jamie.

In September 2019, Jamie was diagnosed with Lymphoblastic Leukaemia.

Jamie was a healthy, happy two-and-a-half-year-old kid who had never had a cold or even a sniffly nose.

“Living in the bush, Jamie spent his days hand rearing his baby lamb and feeding his chickens, riding around on his little bikes, and just enjoying farm life. He has so much character, he just puts a smile on everyone’s face. He’s just such a loveable little kid.”

Within two weeks of getting sick, Nicky took him to the hospital.

“On a Friday afternoon he was really crook. He wouldn’t take any painkillers. He had high temps and was complaining of a sore stomach.”

Nicky decided to take Jamie to Perth Children’s Hospital because they didn’t have doctors in their rural community.

“We couldn’t get an ambulance because the ambulance was a hundred kilometres away, so I just drove Jamie up with my mum. Jamie was diagnosed two days later, and we didn’t leave Perth for a year.”

Jamie started treatment two days after being diagnosed. This included having an operation, a bone marrow trephine, aspirate, and lumbar puncture.

Jamie needed a year of treatment, hundreds of kilometres away from the family’s farm. Nicky spent that time in hospital with him, but COVID-19 meant the rest of the family couldn’t visit and Nicky couldn’t go outside in case she was exposed to the virus.

“I lived in fight and flight mode for the better part of 12 months. Throw in a pandemic and that terrified me more than anything.”

“I don’t think I breathed outside air for ten days. I was in Jamie’s room the entire time. There was so much happening all the time, so many doctors, oncologists coming in constantly, it was just a revolving door.”

“One of the most challenging things I found, was not being able to see Les because he works with hundreds of people so his possibility of passing things onto Jamie, we just couldn’t risk that infection. There was a good two months that we couldn’t get to have any physical contact because of that. That was hard on our relationship.”

Being away from Jamie was hard for his siblings.

“Jamie saw less of his siblings because of his delicate condition and the limited access in the hospital. Jess was extremely distressed at diagnosis, and having to live apart from me for so long caused some abandonment issues. It has had an ongoing mental and emotional impact on her.”

Nicky was introduced to Redkite and received a Red Bag and accessed financial support.

“I had to leave my job to take care of Jamie full time, so we were on a single income. The financial support was great; with one less income it makes it difficult, so it made a massive impact.”  

Nicky also accessed counselling services after returning home.

Coming home after Jamie’s treatment proved to be challenging for Nicky. Having been in fight and flight mode for a year and finally being able to relax didn’t come as easy as she thought it would.

“Coming home was the hardest thing. Once you relax a bit, and you get back to a normal life, so to speak, it’s then that it actually hits you and that’s when you start going through the trauma of what you’ve been through for the last 12 months.”

“When you are in that whirlwind, you’ve got other parents that you are talking to constantly, you are seeing them all the time, in hospital and in the clinic, so you’re very tapped into all of that. Once you’re home and back to your normal world, you feel very vulnerable, so it’s great to have someone to talk to.”

“Redkite helped keep the family strong. Your kindness meant we received counselling for our emotional and mental health. Most importantly, that help came from Redkite’s social workers, who truly understood what they we are going through.”

Jamie is recovering from the effects of chemotherapy, which is long road. 

“Unfortunately, parents are left to pick up the pieces of all of the side-effects of treatment without much support. The psychological effect of everything we have gone through does not even get discussed or acknowledged. If it weren’t for organisations like Redkite’s psychological and mental well-being programs, a lot more Aussies would suffer.”