‘Something’s not right’: Mum’s eerie dream ahead of devastating diagnosis

Melissa Rodger recalls having a “very dark dream” of the Grim Reaper the night before her daughter’s diagnosis.

“I’m not big on any of that sort of stuff, but something inside of me was like something’s not right,” the Victorian mum tells 9honey.

The family had all been struck down with colds, including daughter Chloe, nine, and son Flynn, three. They all recovered, except for Chloe who had developed a temperature.

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“Chloe’s just seemed to linger,” she recalls, explaining Chloe’s father Luke decided to have their daughter checked out at the doctor.

He was then told to take his daughter to the children’s hospital because she looked “really dehydrated” and called Melissa to tell her there were “so many doctors in there checking on her”.

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“Alarm bells started going off in my head,” she says.

They ended the call and the next time Luke rang Melissa his voice was “crackling” and she could “hear tears in his voice”.

“I just said to him, ‘It’s cancer, isn’t it?’ And he broke down.”

Chloe would go on to be diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukaemia (AML), a fast-growing blood cancer that affects the bone marrow.

Melissa and Luke were struggling to cope with the news.

Their daughter’s oncologist assured them “you’ll get to see her 21st birthday and watch her get married” and told them not to Google their daughter’s condition.

But Melissa couldn’t help herself and what she saw was confronting.

Chloe would undergo aggressive treatment for the disease and Melissa and Luke would take turns staying with her in hospital while the other cared for Flynn at home.

At first they simply told Chloe they needed to change her blood which the little girl accepted, however she was distressed to miss her first school camp.

“That was the thing that hurt her the most,” she says.

Chloe would undergo chemotherapy, one round of which was so strong her skin would burn, and her parents needed to bathe her skin in cool water every six hours.

She would also endure two bone marrow transplants. Melissa donated the first round of bone marrow to her daughter and it was deemed a success. They thought Chloe had beaten the disease.

One week after Chloe reached the one-year-cancer-free mark, Luke took her in for a check-up. Chloe’s cancer was back.

The family were told she required a second bone marrow transplant which proved to be much more difficult than the first. “She couldn’t eat for a month,” Melissa recalls.

She had really bad mucositis (inflammation of the mucous membranes lining the mouth and other parts of the gastrointestinal [GI] tract). She could barely talk. There were days where she just slept and slept.”

Chloe was depleted and Melissa was desperate to help her daughter. She reminded her of her father’s upcoming birthday.

“She was really quite down. Her body had been bashed around brutally by this second transplant and we were about a week-and-a-half to Luke’s birthday,” Melissa says.

“And I’m like, ‘Hey, mate, guess what? Dad’s birthday is in a week-and-a-half. What do you reckon that we go home?’ And all of a sudden I could see her little brain ticking and that was just what she needed.

“It was Dad’s birthday, she loves her dad, she’s a daddy’s girl, and she desperately wanted to be home.”

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Chloe was eventually given the all-clear and this year rejoined her friends for her first year of high school.

“She went on her first school camp and she went to the Dua Lipa concert on Saturday night,” Melissa says.

“We’re trying to fill up the tank with lots of memories. We’ve done so many cool things in the last few months,” she says.

Her hair is growing back, too, with blonde highlights.

“It’s nearly at the point where she can nearly pull it back in her ponytail, so I’m happy because her hair was a big part of her.”

Melissa is taking part in the Children’s Cancer Institute’s annual fundraiser 86K for a Cure, although instead of 86 kilometres she is aiming for 150.

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“I sort of feel empowered from it because taking back a little bit of control of what we lost over the last couple of years when you go through treatment, you have no control over life,” she says.

Chloe, who received an A-plus in a math exam and is thriving, was recently asked what she wants to do when she finishes school.

She replied, “I want to be a nurse, because I want to help kids like me.”

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