A WA father is being ordered not to interfere with his teenage son’s chemotherapy for a rare cancer, with doctors saying the boy was weeks from death.
His father says his son is being kidnapped by the state and forced to undergo treatment without his consent.
The boy was removed from his family’s home and taken into the care of the Department of Communities last week. He is now being treated for acute myeloid leukaemia, a rare and aggressive form of blood cancer, at Perth Children’s Hospital.
The Family Court heard on Monday the boy was at “extreme risk” and his treatment amounted to “an emergency” with death expected within weeks without it.
The father told the court the boy was his parents’ property and “this organisation is trying to steal her property – this is not honourable.
“I am here to retrieve my boy.”
The court heard over the weekend the father had removed his son’s chemo line by cutting it, saying he had not consented to this treatment, and took videos of hospital staff without their consent.
Lawyers for the Child and Adolescent Health Service successfully sought orders to continue the treatment.
The Leukaemia Foundation says the five-year survival rate for those under 15 diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia is 75 per cent if they undergo chemotherapy.
The court also banned the father from interfering with or obstructing the chemotherapy, or removing his son from hospital.
This is one of only a handful of such cases in WA history, with the Family Court ruling in 2016 that six-year-old Oshin Kiszko must undergo radiotherapy for a brain tumour, though that case was less clear-cut and the judge noted that the facts in any case considering a child’s best interests could vary “almost infinitely”.
It was the first time such a matter was heard in the WA Family Court and the WA Supreme Court had only previously had two such cases, but more cases may have been before the Children’s Court.
The prescribed chemo and radiotherapy combination were predicted to carry a 50-60 per cent chance of keeping Oshin alive for five years – if begun immediately, which it was not, and also carried a high risk of intellectual and physical disability when used on very young medulloblastoma patients.
Oshin’s parents had refused consent believing the long-term physical and mental burdens of the treatments outweighed the chances of saving his life.
They lost their fight against chemotherapy in March 2016, but won their case against radiotherapy in May, a treatment that had by then only a 30-40 per cent chance of success, given the time elapsed and Oshin’s poor response to chemotherapy.
The judge did not enforce doctors’ bids for further radiotherapy in September 2016 and Oshin died that December.
9 News Perth
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