Australians with brain cancer forced to fly overseas to be operated on by Charlie Teo
Australians already dealing with the crushing blow of being diagnosed with brain cancer are saving their money and packing their bags to pursue their last sliver of hope overseas. WATCH Dr Charlie Teo talk about it here.
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More than 50 Australians dealt the crushing blow that is brain cancer have packed their bags and headed overseas in the past 12 months, chasing their one last slither of hope.
This is the tale of brave men, women and children who have exhausted all treatment options in this country – their only chance is to gather the money, the courage and the will to seek out controversial neurosurgeon Charlie Teo, who for the past 12 months has been unable to perform high-risk surgeries on his home soil.
They are not looking for a cure. They know it’s too late for that. But they want one last chance, one last birthday, one last Christmas, one last cuddle with a loved one.
These cancer patients want to make the decision for themselves about how they navigate their deadly prognosis.
They want to be the ones to decide whether they fight right until the bitter end, exhaust every last option.
They are angry that choice has been taken away from them.
Here are two of their stories.
‘BEST DECISION’
Chantal Bradshaw wanted the blunt truth.
If the cancer tumour in her head was growing yet again, she was going to “hang up the gloves”, say no to any further life-threatening surgeries.
The thought of having another operation made the 43-year-old mother of two feel physically ill — especially when the only neurosurgeon she trusted could no longer perform the risky procedure she’d need in Australia.
Dr Charlie Teo confirmed her worst fear — the tumour, the size of a grapefruit, was again wreaking havoc in her head.
Chantal had asked Dr Teo to be brutally honest with her prognosis. He was.
“Before I had the meeting with Charlie I had decided ‘Nope, that’s it’. I thought ‘my soul can’t take this’. My body is not fit any more, I haven’t been able to exercise. Is this even something I can handle?”
Added to those very real concerns was the fact she would have to travel to China for the operation. Allowing anyone else to operate was “out of the question”.
“I could die, I could be coming home in a body bag. What’s my dad going to do, bring me home like that?” she pondered.
“He’s 80 years old. That’s a huge thing to ask someone to do if things went badly.”
After a lot of discussions with her two daughters, and her mum and dad and extended family in Queensland, Chantal decided to cling onto the one last hope.
She budgeted $100,000 but spent way less — Dr Teo’s fees were under $20,000.
“A few days before flying out I was frantically redoing my will, making my Dad who came with me my power of attorney. He knows what I would want,” she said.
“He knew if something is going bad, turn the machine off. I don’t want to be a vegetable.
“I wanted my kids to be told ‘mummy didn’t make it’. I didn’t want them to think I was alive in some foreign country living like a vegetable.”
Dr Teo recalls his consultation with Chantal, who had been his patient since 2013.
“She came to me and I said “it’s bad Chantal. I’m sorry but it is very extensive. You’ve got a tumour in several different compartments.
“Now I could operate on you, I’m willing, but I don’t think it’s going to buy you too much time.”
Dr Teo remembers Chantal saying to him: “I agree I think I’ve had enough”.
He went away thinking “I won’t hear from her again until I hear that she’s died”.
A week later, Chantal called Dr Teo and told him she had talked to her mum, dad and her two daughters and they had all decided she should give it another shot.
Three weeks after the surgery The Sunday Telegraph caught up with Chantal at home near Batemans Bay.
“My prognosis is pretty good. I feel amazing,” she said.
“It’s only been a few weeks and I can only see me getting better. I’m hoping that it’s all up from here.”
Dr Teo described the surgery as a “good outcome”.
“ I told her she would likely be paralysed but she wasn’t and I think I’ve bought her some time.”
When asked if she had any regrets during our visit to her home, she said “Hell no, best decision of my life really”.
Her mind wandered back to the day of the surgery in Beijing in April; when hospital staff had wheeled her down to the “waiting room” and she lay waiting for Dr Teo to finish the surgery scheduled before hers.
“I was laying there waiting to be knocked out and then they brought out this little doll,” she said.
“This peaceful little girl still asleep. She was the most precious little thing, I just wanted to get up and give her a cuddle. That little tiny hand. Her having to go through something like this.”
Chantal realised it was nine-year-old Sydney schoolgirl Maddy Suy from Haberfield in Sydney.
‘NO REGRETS’
She met Maddy and her dad Alan just days before while checking into the hospital — two Australian families from different worlds with one precious connection.
“It was good to see Maddy come out and know that it went well. That was so good,” Chantal said.
After meeting Chantal, Alan had been making regular trips from his daughter’s bedside up two floors to check in on Chantal and her dad, making them feel calm and not alone in a foreign land.
He knew the anguish Chantal had experienced. He, too, had to make the decision to travel so far, the burden of worst-case scenarios weighing heavily on his own shoulders.
“My wife and I had decided that we were at peace, that if Maddy had a bad outcome and she was paralysed it was better than her being dead,” Alan told The Sunday Telegraph.
“It is a tough decision and there is no right or wrong decision, every parent is entitled to make their own decision for their children,” he said.
“We could be scrutinised for making that decision but we have the right to make that decision and we were lucky that we had a good outcome.”
Sadly, Maddy died six weeks after her surgery.
Her death was from the progression of the ghastly DIPG tumour that was again growing in her brain stem but even so, Dr Teo counts it as a “bad outcome”.
“Charlie did his job. We don’t really care about the criticism. All I can say for us is he did his best, we know he did,” Alan said.
“As a parent going through this and being told that your child is going to die, you would cling onto any sort of hope.
“Even if we had one per cent chance of survival or extension of life it was worth it.
“You either sit there and do nothing or you do something and you might have a chance, and so my wife and I have always taken that philosophy.”
Maddy, who was diagnosed in 2020 had worsening symptoms in December last year.
She had already beaten the odds — the average survival time for patients with malignant high-grade brain stem glioma, known as diffused intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG/DMG), is nine to 12 months.
“We did radiation for a third time, that hadn’t been done before and I literally had to beg her oncologist,” Alan said.
“She was declining and she would have been gone by February if we hadn’t done that.”
By March she was declining again. There were no trials left in Australia that Maddy was eligible for and Alan knew he had to act.
“I could do nothing and just watch her die or do something. And that something was a vaccine created from her tumour.
Maddy had four doses from a sample Dr Teo had resected and saved during Maddy’s first surgery in 2020. The surgery in China meant gave her access to eight more doses.
But it was too little too late. Maddy died after two more doses.
“At the time, with the information that I had and the choices I had, that was the best choice,” he said.
“Unfortunately it didn’t work but it may in the future. We took the risk, Maddy was patient zero, hopefully there will be more so we can actually find a cure one day.”
Alan, who will only speak about his own experience as a parent of Dr Teo’s patient, said he has nothing but respect for the man who cared for his daughter like he would his own.
“Talent should be retained in Australia. Without research and funding we are never going to find a cure, and to stop somebody from operating in Australia where he is a neurosurgeon, that’s his skill, but he also supports the industry in a lot of other ways, I just see it as a massive loss.
“We have lost someone with so much experience and passion just because he’s controversial.”
For Dr Teo, Maddy’s death hit him hard.
“Maddy had surgery overseas — it wasn’t to take the tumour out, she truly had a diffused tumour, it was simply to take some tissue to offer her other treatment options,” he said,
“So if you look at that on paper that went badly as well, I mean it was only six weeks ago and she has now died from her disease.
“She never made a very good recovery after surgery so some could say ‘oh my god that’s like the case that was highlighted on 60 Minutes’, and again on paper it was.
“But the family knew exactly what was going on. They knew all treatment options had been exhausted.
“They knew that they were basically clinging to the last-chance option and they knew the surgery was high-risk, so no regrets from them, and no regrets from me either, because I loved her dearly.
“If she had been my daughter I would have done exactly the same thing and that is, when you’re faced with nothing and someone says there is this very small chance something else might work, then you should go for it.”
Cydonee Mardon is a former patient of Dr Teo
Originally published as Australians with brain cancer forced to fly overseas to be operated on by Charlie Teo
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