‘Waiting for your child to die is not an option’: A GP’s fight to save her daughter
When cancer scientist Matt Dun and his GP wife Phoebe discovered their daughter had an inoperable brain tumour, they put their training to work
On a hot Saturday afternoon in February 2018, Matt and Phoebe Dun were sitting in a hospital corridor, waiting for their two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Josie, to wake up.
She’d just had a general anaesthetic and a brain scan at Newcastle’s John Hunter Hospital. That morning, Josie had been falling over and struggling to move her right arm properly.
Phoebe, a GP, decided to take her to the emergency department. Matt, a cancer researcher in charge of a laboratory at the University of Newcastle, wasn’t too worried – he thought she probably just had an infection.
As they sat on plastic chairs outside the recovery room, a doctor with whom they’d both worked appeared. This was not a man you wanted to see when your toddler has just had an MRI.
