'The doctors said my baby boy had a milk allergy but they were wrong ... now he's gone'
"They acted as if I was purposely not feeding him," the grieving Rockhampton mum reveals. "They took him in a room and I wasn't allowed in there while they fed him. It was horrible."
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At six months old, Chontelle’s baby boy, Patrick, suddenly began vomiting multiple times a day.
As a first-time mum, the 29-year-old from Rockhampton was worried this wasn’t normal behaviour from her otherwise healthy and happy son.
After a check up by her GP and local hospital, Patrick was sent home with a cow’s milk protein intolerance diagnosis.
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For the next two months, Chontelle had appointments with paediatricians and dieticians in the hope of decreasing Patrick’s vomiting, but when all allergy measures were taken, and her baby was losing alarming amounts of weight due to vomiting up to five times per day, the protective mum pleaded for help by going to hospital again.
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"We knew something was definitely wrong with him"
Shockingly, rather than perform any scans on her formula-fed son - who was then just six kilograms (third percentile) at the time - the hospital called in child protection services.
“They acted as if I was purposely not feeding him,” Chontelle tells Kidspot.
“They took him in a room and I wasn’t allowed in there while they fed him. It was absolutely horrible. I was trying everything I could to get him help and this is how I was treated.”
By 10 months old, Patrick was still the same unhealthy weight he was months earlier, and Chontelle desperately voiced her frustration at her local hospital on social media for not investigating her son’s deteriorating condition any further.
“We knew something was definitely wrong with him,” Chontelle says.
“Within a week of us doing that, they took action and we were finally sent to a Brisbane hospital.”
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"I was in complete shock"
Just two days later, Chontelle finally had her answer - but heartbreakingly, it was the most devastating diagnosis she could have imagined.
An MRI showed Patrick had a tumour on the pituitary gland in his brain.
“It was stage two brain cancer,” the emotional mum remembers.
“I was in complete shock. I had no idea where to go from there.”
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"He was still such a happy kid"
Patrick would spend his first birthday recovering from surgery to remove the tumour.
While the procedure was successful in removing the majority of the cancerous mass, Chontelle’s heart was shattered once again when scans revealed it had grown back larger than its original size.
Patrick would have to undergo years of gruelling chemotherapy and drug trials when the former treatment failed to shrink the tumour.
“All through the pain, and vomiting 10 times a day, he was still such a happy kid with a smile on his face,” Chontelle says, fighting back tears.
“The only times he would cry was when he wasn’t allowed to go to school (pre-prep).”
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"He was suddenly gone"
On January 2 this year, Chontelle noticed four-year-old Patrick wasn’t his usual energetic self at home.
“Even with all the medication, he was usually running around, and he was very lethargic that morning, walking really slowly.”
Taking no chances, she immediately called an ambulance, and by the time they arrived just minutes later, her little boy was unconscious.
While her partner, Beau, remained by his son’s bedside in hospital, Chontelle rushed home that same day to pack a bag while Patrick was being prepared for air transfer to Brisbane.
Heartbreakingly, the little boy would never make it.
“I was in the lift going to his room and that’s when he went into cardiac arrest,” the mum-of-one remembers soberly.
“I watched them work on Patrick in the ICU, then he was suddenly gone. It was so traumatising and it haunts me every day.”
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"They never once said he wouldn't make it"
An infection - which was a known side effect from the trial drug that Patrick was on at the time - had turned septic and tragically took the life of Chontelle’s only child two months before his fifth birthday.
“He should have been cured,” the grieving mother says.
“They never once said that he wouldn’t make it. The doctor said he’d never seen anything like it with that type of tumour. Everything it was meant to do, it didn’t. But I wonder if they had listened to me and found the tumour months earlier, could it have been a different outcome?”
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Ten months on from his passing, Chontelle is so heartbroken that she has left every memory of her beloved son in her home just as it was left on the last day of his life as she struggles to come to terms with his loss.
“All his things around the house and the little Christmas tree we put up are all still there, even the paint he put on the floor and walls is there,” she cries.
“I even go to the corner store every day to buy his favourite lollies and put them in the back of the car where he liked to keep them. I wait for him to come home. I know he won’t but it’s all I can do.”
For the second time, Chontelle is participating in the Shitbox Rally, which takes place next month and raises funds for the Cancer Council.
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Originally published as 'The doctors said my baby boy had a milk allergy but they were wrong ... now he's gone'
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