Victoria Robinson is talking fast. She's headed to Sydney on Saturday after qualifying in the 50-metre freestyle at the NSW Country Swimming Championships at Olympic Park. She was looking forward to gaining the competition experience. She's a representative athlete in her age group for her discus throw, and she has just landed a leading role as Cat in the Hat in her school's Dr Seuss theatre production, but she seems more excited to talk about how her younger sister, Alexandra, will be playing a fish in the same show.
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"They are very supportive of each other," the girls' father, Ken, says.
Victoria is 11, and she will spend part of her school holidays undergoing her 26th health scan monitoring the tumour, slightly smaller than a golf ball, near the centre of her brain.
She was diagnosed at three-years-old. The Robinson family was spending time in Sydney when Wendy, Victoria's mother, realised she was having trouble walking.
"She kept falling over," Wendy says in her home at Valentine. "I could see that she had no control over her left foot."
X-rays of her leg came back clear, but something was still wrong. A family friend was concerned about Victoria and Wendy was becoming frantic. The tumour was pushing on the right side of Victoria's brain, causing her left-side weakness. Doctors scrambled. Ken remembers the night he received the call.
"They said 'I'm a doctor'," Ken recalls on Friday, "Your daughter has a tumour, could have days to live, I need your consent to operate." He slumps back in the couch.
"It was horrifying," Wendy says. Suddenly, she and Ken were searching for answers to questions no parent could imagine asking about their child; questions every parent dreads.
It was a nurse who suggested writing could help Wendy process what was happening; part-catharsis, part-memoir, part guide through the traumatic wilderness. Her online blog became a self-published book in 2018 - the guide Wendy and Ken say they "wished we'd had the day we arrived at hospital".
Wendy hopes the book can offer a guide for parents through not just cancer treatment but almost any kind of trauma.
The tumour in Victoria's brain cannot be removed, Wendy says, but after three years of chemotherapy between 2011 and 2014, it has stopped growing and the family has gradually rebuilt their lives.
"We came to the point quite a few years ago that we had to make a choice," Wendy says.
"We could continue living in fear, or we were just going to live like this day is the day we have got. We chose to live like that."
Simon McCarthy
Simon McCarthy is a journalist working at the Newcastle Herald in NSW. He writes news and features, and produces video and multimedia, for the Herald and Herald Weekender magazine. He contributes regularly to the Newcastle Herald’s daily Topics column, and is the co-creator and producer of the Toohey’s News podcast. McCarthy has worked as a journalist in regional NSW since 2013. He joined the newsroom of the Newcastle Herald in 2017 from the Northern Daily Leader in Tamworth where he worked from 2015 to 2016.
Simon McCarthy is a journalist working at the Newcastle Herald in NSW. He writes news and features, and produces video and multimedia, for the Herald and Herald Weekender magazine. He contributes regularly to the Newcastle Herald’s daily Topics column, and is the co-creator and producer of the Toohey’s News podcast. McCarthy has worked as a journalist in regional NSW since 2013. He joined the newsroom of the Newcastle Herald in 2017 from the Northern Daily Leader in Tamworth where he worked from 2015 to 2016.
