Frankie Whitehead sporting her surplus of around 1500 beads of courage.
Frankie Whitehead sporting her surplus of around 1500 beads of courage.
Frankie Whitehead has more than 1500 beads of courage draped around her neck. They are a reminder of the chemotherapy, radiation, immunotherapy and more that she has endured.
She has lived a life far from that of an ordinary eight-year-old, as Frankie has fought leukaemia not once, not twice, but three times.
In honour of their little fighter, her family are taking on the Step Up Sky Tower Challenge 2023, which involves scaling 51 flights of stairs inside Auckland’s Sky Tower.
Team Frankie aims to raise $15,000 toward support and research for Leukaemia and Blood Cancer NZ.
Frankie’s mum Hannah Whitehead said her daughter was “all for” the fundraiser.
“She is an incredibly strong little girl, and you wouldn’t pick her from a crowd for having been so unwell through her childhood,” she said.
Much of her daughter’s lifetime of memories has been surrounded by hospitals. Frankie was three years old when she was first diagnosed with leukaemia in 2017. The news came just two weeks after she had blown the candles out on her birthday cake.
The young Whitehead family were then thrust into a world they knew nothing about.
“It’s been such a life-altering experience,” Hannah said.
She was only 23 years old, and Frankie’s dad Dylan was 25, when they learned their little girl had cancer. On top of that, they had 10-month-old Leo, Frankie’s brother, to take care of too.
Frankie finished treatment in 2020 aged five but relapsed the following year, and again the family repeated a familiar journey to Starship Hospital in Auckland.
At that time, Leo was four years old. He underwent a gruelling surgery to donate marrow to his big sister as he was the only half-match, despite there being tens of millions of donations to choose from.
Frankie with her brother, Leo.
Again, Frankie beat cancer. A feat she revelled in for a year - until last September, it again returned.
The family had exhausted all curative treatment options in New Zealand, so the Starship team advocated for them to receive CAR T-cell therapy in Brisbane, Australia.
The treatment in Australia involved extracting Frankie’s T-cells, and then they were shipped to the US to be genetically modified to seek and destroy cancer before being placed back into Frankie’s body.
Hannah said her daughter is, for a third time, cancer-free and a “typical eight-year-old”.
Frankie has been back at One Tree Point School since the beginning of the year, where she enjoys playing netball, singing and art.
She receives three-monthly bone marrow aspirates (biopsies) until two years after the T-cell therapy. She also receives an at-home weekly injection called a SCIG, which will likely be a life-long treatment to ensure her body doesn’t regain the ability to create B-cells.
But their journey is far from over, as Hannah said they will continue to advocate for the Leukemia and Blood Cancer NZ cause.
Team Frankie - made up of Hannah, Dylan and friend Katie Barclay, as well as Hannah’s brother Steven Nink and dad Eddie Nink - will scale the Sky Tower stairs on August 6.
Frankie will be there on the day to cheer on her loved ones, sporting a ‘Team Frankie’ T-shirt alongside her brother.
