By Di Webster. Reported by Louise Talbot in Ocean Grove
Who Magazine, July 2009
On March 2 this year, 12 months after surgeons removed a melanoma from her back, Hailey James strolled into the cancer centre at Geelong Hospital with her mother, Terri, for a routine check-up. Having ditched her daily doses of the immunotherapy Interferon six months earlier, “I felt like I was alive,” says the bubbly hairdresser from Ocean Grove on Victoria’s Bellarine Peninsula. “I felt normal again.” It was the last time she could say that. Flicking a fluorescent light on James’s recent scans, her oncologist pointed to several secondary tumours on her lungs and a l2cm tumour on her liver. The doctor’s prognosis was blunt: “He told me I was going to die in three months,” she says, her eyes growing moist. “It was horrible.” As a shattered Terri, 47, fell to the floor, the only advice the doctor could offer Hailey was to go home and sort out her affairs. “What affairs?” the lifelong sun-lover shrieked. “I am 26 years old. What’s there to sort out?”
Quite a bit, as it turned out. On April 18, Hailey married engineering student Dan James, 23, her partner of five months, and together they embarked on a mission to prove doctors wrong. “This is the Hailey roller-coaster,” jokes the pizza-loving party girl as she feeds celery into a juicer whirring on the kitchen bench, “and he was ready to jump on board!”
Guided by therapists from the Gawler Foundation, a non-profit cancer support centre with a holistic approach, James left hairdressing (to avoid the chemicals), junk food, booze and bikinis and entered a universe she barely knew existed. “I am not outside, I am not working, I have no structure to my day,” says James, whose new daily ritual includes a mountain of organic vegetables and three hours of meditation. “My life revolves around juice.”
On May 25, 12 weeks to the day after her diagnosis, Hailey and Dan entered the foundation’s Yarra Valley Living Centre in rural Victoria for a 10-day retreat including meditation, counselling and nutrition lessons. “It’s a massive life change, but I have no other option,” says James, who endured three rounds of chemotherapy before the trip. “I want to beat this and show other people hope.”
Like fellow Victorian Clare Oliver, whose death from melanoma at age 26 in 2007 highlighted the danger of solariums, James, who used a solarium six times when she was 20, has been spreading the sun-safe message. “I am an Aussie girl, always out in the sun and never wore a rashie,” says James, whose first hint of the tragedy to come was an itchy mole just above her right shoulder blade. When she had it checked in 2005, “the doctor told me I didn’t have anything to worry about.” Only when James insisted in 2007 that the mole be removed was her melanoma discovered. “Nothing is worth going through what I am going through to look good with a nice suntan,” says James, who wants to see solariums banned and an annual “check your mole” day. Says Terri, “She’s a pretty determined girl.”
Sitting in the courtyard of her parents’ home, Hailey flips through her wedding album with Dan and Terri and, as a late-afternoon chill descends, talks about the future-and Hailey is convinced she has one. “I want to be here,” she says. “I should have a chance to live without all this heartache. I don’t want to lose.” As her own eyes fill with tears, she turns to her new husband and her mum and asks the impossible: “Don’t cry.”
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