When two best friends both found themselves battling their children’s cancer last year, the mothers felt their paths may have crossed way back to “do this journey together”.

Family lawyer Anne Marie Bisazza is convinced there was a purpose behind it and she found it in sharing her experience and the uncanny belief that hers was a “beautiful story of coincidences” that contrived to help her out. 

“Or maybe they were no coincidences at all,” she says, looking back at a thorny five months – out of which “lots of good emerged”.

Anne Marie opened up about the ordeal of the past year in the hope of encouraging others facing similar upheavals.

Her god-daughter Cikki, the child of her inseparable friend Laragh Cassar, was diagnosed with leukaemia just months before her son Nicky started his own fight against an aggressive cancer.

“I believe everything is connected and that people never cross your path by accident,” Anne Marie says about befriending Laragh – “the sister I never had” – who doubled as her witness and bridesmaid at her wedding.

“My friend helped me through her own experience. I was supporting her, and then my son’s illness shifted her focus slightly, and that helped her too.

“It was like a piece of intricate filigree that you could not piece together if you tried really hard,” Anne Marie says with the benefit of hindsight, clutching a pendant Laragh gifted her.

On it is inscribed: “In thick and thin.” And she laughs about the ‘through’ not fitting in.

But there was not much to smile about last year.

Nicky’s diagnosis

Nicky, 10, was diagnosed with the worst stage of Burkitt’s leukaemia after a hard gland appeared under his chin in April 2022. It was first considered a case of glandular fever… but it kept growing.

Several doctor visits, constant monitoring, tests and two holidays later, a mutation caused a malaise in the boy that sent alarm bells ringing and he was urgently admitted to the child cancer patients’ ward. 

It was August when the family was stunned by the fact they had one hour to pack up and check in to hospital. Nicky did not leave again before January of the following year.

“The cancer doubled every 24 hours, like compound interest. It had spread everywhere. We did not have the luxury of time. He had to undergo a chemo bombardment.”

Anne Marie was told this treatment had a 60 per cent success rate, with a million side effects. 

It would mean Nicky was going to be “as sick as a dog” and that Mater Dei’s supportive care would be taken to its limits.

“You do know what that means,” said consultant Nathalie Galea, who orchestrated Nicky’s victory over Burkitt’s.

Anne Marie was soon to find out as she navigated a “constant fine line”. The issue was how to get Nicky through the treatment. It would work, but first, he had to survive it.

Looking back at five months of witnessing her son’s frail body being battered by the most aggressive form of high-dose chemo, which also landed him in the intensive therapy unit, she almost cannot believe it happened.

Nicky’s responsive body suffered every side effect.

Anne Marie spent three weeks at a stretch in Rainbow, alternating with her husband for five days. Being heavily immune-compromised, no visitors were allowed, and his 12-year-old brother Beppe could only see him from behind glass.

Anne Marie stood by her ailing son’s side through seven cycles of sometimes 24-hour-long chemo infusions, armed with determination and focused on making things better, as he experienced the anguish of the cocktail of heavy medication that oncology nurses administered meticulously.

Nutrition was crucial, but every time Nicky would vomit, his feeding tube would come out too and he would have to withstand the trauma of reinserting it, as well as the complications caused by a foreign body when his immunity was “zero”.

In his third cycle, which required the highest existing dose of very toxic chemo for 24 hours, Nicky ended up in ITU. His kidneys took a major hit, he suffered 11 seizures, high blood pressure, life-threatening brain swelling and the chemo had to stop. 

His parents witnessed him clutching his head and screaming in pain, turning blue and not breathing.

 

The brave boy’s suffering was too much to bear, and that was when Anne Marie broke down.

“Carlo and I had to have the conversation about him not making it. We prepared ourselves.”

But it was not to be… Nicky’s last chemo was administered at 12.05am on January 1 and it was cause for celebration. Nine days later, he walked out of hospital, alive and well. It was a momentous and happy day.

But ironically, it also marked the start of a deep low for Anne Marie. She felt she was in a “place of privilege that messed with my mind” and was consumed by so-called survivors’ guilt.

“I never asked ‘why me’ when he was diagnosed with cancer – no one is special and immune. But I asked ‘why me’ when we left hospital when other kids have passed away. 

“It was hard to process why I was graced with being able to bring my son home,” Anne Marie admits.

With the worst presumably behind them, Anne Marie sank into a black hole, having lost the ‘protection’ that the dreaded chemotherapy had armed her with and facing the real test.

Waiting those crucial weeks to see how Nicky’s body had reacted and out of the “safe haven of Rainbow”, Anne Marie suddenly needed to process what the family had been through, and she admits it floored her.

“The cancer was burnt, but so were we. It is like being trampled over by a herd of buffalo and making it out alive. We had to lick our wounds…

“It is ironic that my son is in remission, and I am going to grief therapy. I went from referring my clients to a bereavement counsellor to seeking her services myself,” she says.

An advocate for therapy, it was this that brought her back to herself.

“What does not kill you makes you stronger, but it also traumatises you in the process and the answer is therapy.”

She recalls her son asking why she looked so worried. “It was because he was used to me with make-up and dressed up. So, I made an effort to do that throughout.”

Last year’s Mother’s Day was characterised by a “carefree” spirit that has been lost along the way and that she is now “grieving”. 

It may return, but Anne Marie also has a “new friend called anxiety, who can leave me in peace sometimes, or be a cumbersome presence”.

This Mother’s Day, Anne Marie is a mum who has had to deal – “in a tangible way” – with her son’s mortality; a mum who has had to have that “real” conversation with her husband about when it would happen and what they would do. 

“We did not know pain – that sort of pain. Dealing with the possible mortality of a child.“I always feel you need to make sense of everything that happens to you, and maybe my story can help give courage to others; a glimmer of hope.”

The greatest chance of relapse was within the first three months. That window ended on April 1.

Nicky returned to school after Easter and, hopefully, his Hickman line will be removed next week. He is happy and feels resilient, Anne Marie says.

“What happened has nothing to do with God. It is nature; people just get sick. God just gives you help along the way, and I had it in abundance. For that I am most grateful.”