Fresh hope for Travis

Travis Hobson complained to his mother last month about the pain in his head he'd been experiencing on and off since Christmas.

All sorts of things ran through Heather Hobson's mind to explain her 11-year-old son's headaches: allergies to foods or medicine, a fall on the trampoline ...

But she was not too worried. Travis was a relatively healthy boy, and, apart from the headaches, he was fine. He was still sailing his P-class yacht and riding his Palamino pony Sparky.

But the headaches became more frequent and painful, and eventually a severe headache caused him to vomit, and Mrs Hobson took her son to the doctor.

That trip in February was the first of five that resulted in a shocking diagnosis for the Dargaville boy.

Over the next three weeks, Travis' condition deteriorated. On March 11, a CAT scan at Whangarei hospital confirmed a brain tumour - a golfball-sized "posterior fossa tumour" - which was blocking the brain's drainage system, causing pressure and his head to ache.

Travis was transferred the next day to Auckland's Starship Children's Hospital where surgeons informed the family that without surgery to remove the tumour, an off-white mass, he would die.

On the night before surgery on March 17, Travis said he was not too worried about the operation. "I'm a little bit nervous, but not really," he said with a grin.

Through a 5cm hole in the back of Travis' skull, neurosurgeon Andrew Law and his team pierced the tumour with an ultrasound probe then meticulously hoovered up its bloody core. Sitting directly below the golfball-sized tumour was Travis' brain stem - the thickened end of the spinal cord that joins the brain and controls vital functions like breathing and the heartbeat. If Dr Law damaged the brain stem, Travis could need permanent life support or become mute, deaf or blind. Without the operation, Travis would die.

Each precise movement was judged carefully through the lenses of a $200,000 binocular microscope.

On Thursday, a week after the operation, Travis was making good progress. He was eating and drinking normally and was doing some walking. Some residual double vision meant he was unable to read, but Mrs Hobson said that was the least of her worries.

 

Unfortunately, the tumour is one of the most malignant and aggressive cancers that grows in the brain's drainage system.

Pathologists confirmed on Thursday that the tumour was a "medullo blastoma", meaning that Travis and his family will be tied to the Starship Hospital for at least the next year while Travis receives extensive therapy to kill any remaining cancer cells.

Mrs Hobson, who usually home schools Travis and his brother and sister on the family's 10-acre block near Dargaville, is determined not to let the crisis splinter the close family unit.

Dr Law, who has witnessed the trauma many families suffer when their child is diagnosed with cancer, is clear about the impact of a cancer that "has no respect for class, sex, age or race". "It's one of the worst things a family can go through."