Ray of hope

Nobody would consider the parents of children with cancer lucky, but for two families who were included in a ground-breaking Australian program to fight childhood cancers, lucky is exactly how they feel. Genevieve Gannon meets those families.

- Genevieve Gannon

Luck has moved through the lives of Sydney couple Mina and Rob Caterjian in a most capricious way. They struggled to conceive and suffered several miscarriages over eight years until they welcomed a brown-eyed daughter with a loving and curious personality. For 11 months, their lives felt full of happiness and good fortune, until fate turned again and they received the grave news their little girl, Ellie, had a rare and aggressive cancer. The doctors were despairing that there was nothing they could do when their luck changed again: Ellie was accepted into a new research program using DNA sequencing to develop treatment targeted to her cancer’s specific genetic mutation. It was still a long shot at a cure, but for Rob and Mina it was hope. The Zero Childhood Cancer Program had just opened and Ellie was among the first acutely sick Australian children to be included.

“Had Ellie been born a year prior, this wouldn’t have been available,” says Mina. “As she was leaving the ICU the doctor said, this is a miracle.”

Ellie was chosen for the ZERO pilot program of just 12 children – later expanded to 58 – to have her cancer analysed by a team of experts using the very latest technology. Sitting in a cafe in the Sydney suburb of Earlwood, Mina recounts how giving birth had felt like the end of their struggles, not realising what lay ahead.

“We thought, we can do anything because we finally have our child,” Mina says. “Then we noticed she wasn’t meeting her milestones. She was losing weight. I kept going back to the GP. We were told things like, ‘You’ve changed formula; she’s not used to it. She’s got reflux’.”