A McDonald’s worker in Adelaide knew something was wrong with her health when she began dropping things at work.
What she couldn’t have imagined was that her seeming clumsiness was actually a sign of something far worse – brain cancer.
But worse than that, it’s taken five years from her Macca’s muck ups to it actually being put down to the malignant disease.
“It’s the scariest thing I’ve ever been told,” Amy Docherty, of Seaford Heights, south of the city, said of her recent diagnosis.
She is now facing six weeks of exhausting and intense treatments to try and battle the cancer.
Ms Docherty was 17 when her inability to pick anything up at the fast food outlet caused her colleagues to become concerned.
“I was rushed to the Royal Adelaide (Hospital) as a code stroke … it was really scary for me,” she told The Advertiser.
“They cleared me of a stroke in a few hours and that’s when they discovered that there were two abnormal parts of my brain.”
Ms Docherty had an arteriovenous malformation (AVM), which is when blood vessels incorrectly connect the arteries and veins meaning not enough oxygen gets to the tissues surrounding those vessels.
She was also found to have excessive blood vessel growth which can cause port wine birthmarks as well as brain complications, including seizures.
Ms Docherty says she was told this was like having a “birthmark on your brain”.
In 2019, the AVM was removed and the “birthmark” was monitored.
‘Worst possible news’
By December 2020, Ms Docherty’s care team at the Royal Adelaide Hospital had found the birthmark had grown.
“My neurologist told me … they were thinking it might be a tumour,” she told the paper.
A biopsy came back inconclusive but the affected area didn’t stop expanding.
Medics have said Ms Docherty has astrocytoma, a slow growing brain tumour. At stage 2, which she has, it can huddle in small clusters and is difficult to entirely remove during surgery.
Seizures are a sign of astrocytoma which can effect motor skills depending on where the cancerous cells have clustered.
In September 2023, when she was 22, it had doubled in size.
In November doctors tried to remove the tumour as best they could but since then it has only come back stronger.
“The day before surgery the pre-op scan showed it measured 20mm and now it measures 23mm,” Ms Docherty said.
“It was the worst possible news I have ever received.”
“So whatever they resected during surgery has grown back and it’s growing back more.”
She is now facing six weeks of radiation therapy every day to try and battle the cancer and stop it going from stage 2 to stage 3 or 4 which are even harder to treat.
“The first thing I thought was ‘am I going to die?’” Ms Docherty told The Advertiser.
“I find myself thinking ‘why me? What did I do to deserve this in life?’’
Ms Docherty has set up an online fundraising page to help with her medical and living costs as she will have to take unpaid leave while she is in treatment and recovering.