“She’ll be right”
It’s a stormy afternoon in Auckland, and Kelvin and his wife, Amie, are sitting on their couch. Their newborn baby is sleeping on Amie’s chest, and the couple are reflecting on the journey they’ve been on over the past five years.
It all began in early 2020, when their first child, Max, had just turned one. “I’d been back at work from maternity leave for all of two weeks when COVID hit,” Amie says. “And then Kelvin was made redundant. So it was quite a stressful time!”
Fortunately, mechanical engineer Kelvin was able to find another role without too much trouble, and before long, he’d started a new job at the same place that Amie worked.
Shortly after starting, Kelvin went to the GP complaining of increasingly bad headaches.
“I think with COVID as well as all the changes, we kind of wrote the headaches off as him being under a lot of stress,” Amie says.
Kelvin’s GP prescribed him a series of different painkillers to try and get the headaches under control, but nothing seemed to work. About three months after starting his new job, Kelvin decided to go and get his eyes tested to see if his vision might be the culprit.
“We went down to Specsavers,” Kelvin recalls. “The guy there said, ‘Oh, there’s something wrong with your eyeballs, they’re really swollen.’”
Kelvin was urged to go straight to the Greenlane eye clinic, and once there, he was told he needed to go to Middlemore Hospital. “By this point, it was quite late, so we asked if we could nip home and grab a bag,” Amie says. “And they were like, ‘No, no. Straight there. Straight to ED.’”
Because of COVID restrictions, Amie had to drop him off outside the hospital and go home. “That was really tough,” she says. “I wanted to be there to ask questions and understand properly, but I just had to come home and wait to hear what was going on. It was a very surreal feeling to not be able to support him.”
At the hospital, Kelvin didn’t have to wait long to find out what the problem was.
“The doctors woke me up at 3 am to tell me I had a mass in my brain. I was mostly just annoyed they couldn’t have waited until 6 am to tell me the bad news!” Kelvin jokes.
In the morning, he was taken to Auckland Hospital in an ambulance. An MRI scan confirmed the exact location of the mass, and he had surgery to remove it.
“Even once they did the surgery, there was a two-week period where we didn’t know what the mass was,” Amie says.
During this wait, she found it hard not to turn to Google for information. She went into a panic reading about glioblastoma, an aggressive type of brain cancer with a poor prognosis. “When we got the news that it was central nervous system lymphoma, I think we finally took a breath. Finding out it wasn’t glioblastoma was massive.”
While Amie still worried about the diagnosis and what it would mean for the future, Kelvin reassured himself that everything would be fine. “I’ve always worked with the saying, ‘She’ll be right!’” he laughs.
Although Kelvin took a relaxed approach to his diagnosis, his treatment was serious. “Every three weeks, Kelvin would spend a week or so in hospital for chemo, and then have a week or two at home.”
“That was really hard with a young kid at home,” says Amie. “Max didn’t understand why Daddy was gone for a week every couple of weeks.”
Fortunately, during Kelvin’s second round of chemotherapy, he met Natasha from LBC at the hospital. “She’s been around from the get-go, and she’s been amazing,” says Amie. “She organised a play therapist so we could get some ideas on how to help Max process what was going on.”
After he finished chemo, Kelvin spent a month back in the hospital for his stem cell transplant. When his small intestine became inflamed after the transplant, he wasn’t allowed to eat anything for two whole weeks.
“He was such a grump through those two weeks!” Amie laughs.
After some recovery time at home, Kelvin made a gradual return to work, and since then, life has been mostly smooth sailing. He’s had several clear MRI scans and now just has one each year to keep an eye on things.
Amie says, “Every year when I know his annual MRI is due, in those few weeks leading up to it, I always have those recurring thoughts of, ‘What happens if it’s back? What do we do this time?’”
“Kelvin doesn’t care though, he just sees the MRI as a chance to have a nap!”
Although the future is uncertain, Kelvin and Amie are getting on with life. Back in 2020, just before Kelvin started treatment, he was able to get a last-minute fertility appointment to freeze some sperm. In March this year, the couple were thrilled to welcome their second son, Dominic, after three rounds of IVF.
It’s clear that Kelvin and Amie have been a huge source of support for each other during the past few years. Throughout all the anxiety, they’ve kept their sense of humour and managed to laugh together through the hard days.
“You’ve got to laugh at the small things,” says Kelvin. “Throughout everything, I was laughing all the time. I spent more time laughing than I did crying.”
