TE AWAMUTU NEWS | 1
THURSDAY MARCH 7, 2024
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MARCH 7, 2024
Fionnlagh’s cancer journey The Child Cancer Foundation’s Street Appeal is on tomorrow and Saturday. Ōhaupō couple Stacey and Jonathan shared their daughter’s story with Steph Bell Jenkins.
Fionnlagh, pushed by her mother Stacey Ross, catches raindrops as she leaves her therapy session at Conductive Education Waikato in Hamilton.
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It has been 551 days since Waikato Hospital doctors discovered a golf-ball-sized tumour ballooning inside Fionnlagh Adams’ brain. The four-year-old was taken to Starship Children’s Hospital that night, Saturday, September 3, 2022. Six days later, a medical team performed a ninehour surgery to remove the medulloblastoma, an aggressive form of cancer that had grown between her brainstem and her cerebellum in just 4-6 weeks. “Now that we go back and look at the symptoms – the droopy eye, the extra tiredness, the lower appetite, the poor coordination, the sleepiness, the vomiting – they are all signs that there is a neurological problem,” Fionnlagh’s mother, Stacey Ross, said. “But, despite four doctor visits over the previous month, no one picked it up.” When Fionnlagh was admitted to Starship, Stacey and her husband Jonathan Adams vowed to do everything possible to save their daughter. “And we have,” Stacey said. “We’ve done everything the doctors told us to do.” Fionnlagh’s operation left her suffering from posterior fossa syndrome, a condition characterised by a range of neurological problems including muscle weakness and speech difficulties. “When she woke up, she couldn’t move,” Stacey said. “She couldn’t walk, she couldn’t talk, she couldn’t open up her eyes. She could breathe, thankfully. She could breathe by herself, but that’s about all she could do.” In the days since, Fionnlagh has had “countless
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MRIs”, four brain surgeries, ovarian harvest surgery and 30 doses of radiation requiring general anaesthetic. “She’s had horrific chemotherapy – she lost all of her hair, all of her eyebrows, her little eyelashes, all of it gone, everything – but we chose to save now and fix later,” Stacey said. “We were like, so long as we get through it all and have her at the end of it then we’ve done the right thing.” Stacey admits she simply doesn’t have the energy to begin processing her grief around everything her family has been through over the past 18 months. “If I sit there and I think about it, or I focus on it too much, I’m not going to be able to get up in the morning,” she said. “At the moment it’s just easier to like, push it to the side, be busy and just get on with life.” After making sure their homeschool lessons are completed by midday, Stacey piles her five children into the car and takes the now familiar trip from their family home in Ōhaupō to Conductive Education Waikato. The government-funded unit, integrated into Woodstock Primary School in Hamilton, provides a family-focused child development service for children with learning, communication or mobility challenges. Shortly after 1pm on February 22, Fionnlagh, now six years old, is working with her conductive education practitioner, Melinda Ashton. Her arms and legs trembling with effort, Fionnlagh crawls across the cream carpet of her
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