‘We found something we shouldn’t have’

Over the course of October every year, the challenge sees thousands of Australians get on their bikes, nominate how many kilometres they want to ride and then ask their friends to sponsor them, all with the same mission: to fight kids’ cancer, by raising money for the Children’s Medical Research Institute.

While her partner’s family had intimate experience with the disease, Nicollette “had nothing to do with cancer beforehand, believe it or not”.

But the mum-of-three had no idea how close to home that cause would soon become.

“Out of the blue”, in 2019, her youngest son Mitchell, a junior ironman and state-level ten-pin bowler, began complaining of shoulder pain from a skateboarding injury while away at a training camp.

The then-12-year-old had been selected to represent North Queensland at Melbourne’s Australian National Junior Championship for ten-pin bowling, but needed a clean bill of health in order to attend.

“We took him to the doctors, and she said, ‘We’ll do an X-ray and just make sure you didn’t breaking anything and it went unnoticed’,” Nicollette told news.com.au.

“And we went and got it done, and basically they put him in one position, and the technician said, ‘Oh, just a minute’ and she came back a few minute later and said, ‘The doctor has had a quick look and he wants you to take the X-ray in another position Mitchell’.

“She took forever and then came back and asked us to take a seat in a specific room before we left to have a ‘quick chat’, and said the doctor thought he’d seen something.

“The doctor said, ‘Great news, nothing’s broken’, and I thought, ‘Well, what’re we waiting around for?’ And then he said, ‘Oh, but we’ve found something we shouldn’t have’, and he was so blunt about it … And at that point, I thought, ‘Oh God, this is getting a bit ominous.’”

What the doctor had seen – and Nicollette and Mitchell were only informed of after being sent to Cairns Base Hospital – was a mass behind his chest plate “the size of a large apple” that was diagnosed as B-cell lymphoma.

“It turned out that him being so fit and healthy was probably what saved him,” Nicollette said.

“The scariest part was that the oncologist told me if he’d got on that plane to Melbourne, the air pressure may have meant that the tumour would have led him to suffocate. It was such a shock.”

Mitchell was eventually flown to Brisbane in a “small craft, and it just went from there”, enduring six months of chemotherapy to shrink the tumour before going into remission in July 2020. He was declared cancer-free last August.

When the Cycle Challenge came around this year, Nicollette asked her son if he’d like to join her.

“I said, ‘Don’t you think it’s a great way to give back if you rode?’ and he said, ‘Yeah, I’m in’,” she said.

“So he was rather happy to. He gets a little bit tired because his stamina’s still not back where it used to be – he’s only just moved to six-monthly doctor’s appointments – but he’s finished all his kilometres for the challenge.”

Participating in the challenge now, she said, has taken on a different significance.

“It’s like it was meant to be. My younger sister said to me, ‘It’s so funny, it’s like the universe knew you’d have to do this, that there was a point you were doing this in the first place’,” she recalled.

“And I thought, well, it’s for a fantastic cause anyway. But it just brings it home a bit more, I think now, when it’s your own child that’s been impacted.”

You can sponsor Mitchell’s Great Cycle Challenge ride and find out more about his story here.

Originally published as Mum reveals doctor’s ‘ominous’ find on son’s X-ray