'I thought I'd found my happiness': Melissa's marriage ended in the cruelest way
By Jo Abi|
Melissa was just 29 when she was diagnosed with cervical cancer, and had beaten the disease when her husband Ivan began his own battle.
"?He came home from work one day," she tells 9Honey. "He was sitting in the garage doing stuff, unpacking, and he got a stitch and when he got the stitch he dropped."
He assured her he was "all good" but she could "see the pain in his face."
"I said, 'I think you might have an appendicitis.' He kept pointing down to his groin and I said we need to take you to the hospital.
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Melissa's own cancer had been caught a decade earlier during a routine cervical screening.
"?And I had never had any abnormal pap smears before so I had no signs of anything," she explains.
"And I went for a pap smear and I found out that I had cancer through the pap smear. But I didn't have the normal HPV related cancer. I had endocervical, which is a different type of one."
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In fact Melissa was the fourth generation in her family to have been diagnosed with cervical can?cer.
"My mum was young, I think she was about 23 or 24, when she had a radical hysterectomy," Melissa says, who now holds fears for her daughter Sarah and is planning to pay for annual cervical screenings for her.
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Melissa's own mother struggled with the news her daughter had been diagnosed with the disease. Melissa underwent her own hysterectomy when her daughter was three.
The last thing Melissa and Ivan thought when they presented to hospital with his groin pain years later was that he was suffering from cancer too.
"It turned out that there was an 8cm mass and it turned out to be testicular cancer," she says.
"It was it was a bit surreal," she recalls. "He was diagnosed on Friday operated on the Monday."
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Melissa and Ivan were told "if you're gonna get a cancer, testicular is the one you want because people beat it all the time. But he had a rare form, there was no treatment for him".
"I thought I found my happiness, my forever. And yeah, unfortunately it just didn't turn out that way."?
By then both her children, Ryan and Sarah, had grown close to Ivan.
"The kids were in the mindset, mum beat the cancer so dad's going to beat it too," she says. "But then we kind of realised that that just wasn't going to happen."
Ivan died four years ago when he was 48. ?
"His passing was really quick," she says. "He called me at work on the Friday because I had just gone back to work after having a week off because he was having some pain issues.
"I came straight home after picking up the kids and I just I could see it, I could see that he wasn't okay. I could, in myself, I felt it was the time. And I think he did too. He rang his family in New Zealand, some of his family members, and spoke to them.
"And then the next morning he woke up, I woke up and I cooked the kids bacon and eggs and I had just sat down in the lounge room and he came looking for me and he's like, 'Baby I need you, I need you'.
"And he was like stumbling and I just knew and then he passed away later on that afternoon."
Melissa and Ivan had been trying to take him home to New Zealand but they didn't make it.
She organised for a "tangi," a traditional Mจกori ceremony for mourning someone who has died,' to be held at home.
Melissa's children have been supported by cancer charity Canteen and Camp Quality via Redcliffe Hospital, which has helped her in her own grief.
"I think it was probably about six months into Ivan's battle, the kids were really struggling with the fact of knowing that he was going to pass," she says.
Although it took time for Melissa to process the loss of Ivan.
"I still like to think he's here," she says. "I think it's just learning to deal with that this is the situation now.
"We talk about him every day and still light a candle every day for him, so there's little things that we do to keep his spirit alive within ourselves and I think that's definitely been an important part of their healing process," she says.
Melissa has signed up for Canteens 'Quit for Cancer' fundraiser as a way of "giving back to Canteen for everything they've done for my family."
Melissa has chosen to give up sugar which is proving challenging. Ryan and Sarah have been trying to tempt their mum, but they know her sacrifice is for a good cause.
"They keep trying to entice me, so they're like, 'Let's go and get a slushy Mum,' or, 'Let's go and get an ice cream.' But, you know what, that's okay. I will in a couple weeks time."
