The doctor suspected Maggie had a viral infection, but when Emma Wright later noticed a vein bulging in her daughter’s neck she immediately took her to the emergency department at Whanganui Hospital.
“They checked out her lungs and it turned out she had this mass on her chest that had collapsed her left lung, and had compressed her heart right down.”
The next morning her parents and three siblings, Eddie, Ronnie and Annie, were flown with Maggie by air ambulance to Starship children’s hospital in Auckland.
After numerous tests, Maggie was diagnosed with T-cell lymphoblastic lymphoma, which is a rare form of blood cancer.
The leukaemia treatment took over two years. She was 6 years old when it started.
At one of the lowest points, Maggie spent 18 days in the intensive care unit at Starship due to a serious infection.
“She wasn’t able to walk for six weeks and had to learn to walk again.”
The hardest part for Maggie was being away from her three siblings, especially her sister, whom she is very close to.
Covid-19 lockdowns in Auckland also made accessing hospital visits and flights more difficult. There was also the fear of Covid-19 infection.
Reaching the end of a long journey of chemotherapy treatment has been a huge relief for Maggie as well as her family, but it has taken her mother some time to come to terms with.
“I guess it’s like with anything, you kind of have to process that in order to move on, and it took me a long time to process what we’ve been through and move forward,” Emma Wright said.
Students at Fordell School took part in a Shine Bright Day and wore rainbow, colourful clothing to celebrate the end of Maggie’s treatment.
At the gates of the school, they formed a guard of honour for her to walk through.
Emma Wright said watching her daughter make her way through the crowd of children was “the highest high we could have possibly got to”.