Napier’s Meg Higgs, a 22-year-old nursing student, made history as the first person in New Zealand to trial an antibody drug for a form of childhood cancer.
Higgs tried dinutuximab - which is now standard treatment for neuroblastoma - after having stage 4 cancer at age 6, and went into remission for almost a decade.
But cancer is tricky.
Despite her treatments, it has now come back five times — most recently just months after her fourth diagnosis and surgery in 2024.
Higgs is now getting herself ready to try something new again - in Mexico - in a last attempt to beat the rare and aggressive cancer she’s been fighting since age 6.
When she was first diagnosed, the cancer was in her bones and marrow, meaning she was classified as stage 4.
“I remember the pain ... I have blurs of waking up and vomiting, and I had a Christmas in the hospital that year,” Higgs told Hawke’s Bay Today.
She went through chemotherapy, surgery, a bone marrow transplant and a clinical trial.
“It was devastating,” her mother Arlene Perry said.
“I wanted to protect her childhood but there’s nothing you can do. You’re just absolutely helpless.”
For almost 10 years after, Higgs lived cancer-free thanks to dinutuximab, which triggered her body’s immune system to attack the cancer cells.
But at 15, the disease returned, this time in her jaw. Then again at 18. Then again at 21 in her neck.
And now, in her final year of nursing studies at Massey University in Wellington, it is back, on the opposite side of her neck.
“It’s scary because before I got maybe at least two years in between my diagnoses, and this time I had a few months,” Higgs said.
“It’s hard to continue my life normally because I don’t know if or when I’ll be stopped because of this ... it’s just so uncertain and it’s so anxiety.
“I try to live in the now. I do crafts, I love reading books, I hang out with my flatmates. I focus on the small things that make me happy.”
After completing a gruelling three-week course of radiation in Wellington, Higgs is physically exhausted from radiation and struggling with throat pain and insomnia.
“I am also nervous because I don’t really know if it’s completely gone. That’s when this other treatment comes in.”
She is heading to the Sanoviv Medical Institute in Mexico, where she’ll undergo an integrative treatment programme that combines Eastern and Western therapies, with a mix of professionals from oncologists to psychologists.
“I don’t have any guarantees for this treatment,” Higgs says.
“But to me, it’s something that will at least help me recover from radiation, give my body a boost, and I am hoping that it gives me a few more years to finish my degree and start working.”
As a nursing student, Higgs says she’s approaching the treatment with a mix of hope and scrutiny.
“I’m always going to do chemo, surgery, radiation, whatever I can do.
“But it’s my fifth time having cancer now, second time within less than a year. So, it’s getting to the point where I think I need to be looking at this sort of stuff if I want to stay here.”
The trip costs about $80,000 and was made possible through borrowed funds and community fundraising efforts, including a Givealittle page.
“I’ve borrowed money ... the Givealittle is awesome because it will help us to pay it.”
Higgs is arriving in Mexico on Wednesday.
“I want to see my family grow up, I want to spend time with my friends, I want to work as a nurse,” she says.
“I just want to be here.”