Father dies at work while trying to pay for cancer treatment for son in coma
In the space of one month, Isaiah Carney’s life has turned upside down after two tragedies hit him in quick succession.
In mid-January, his 17-year-old brother Zeek slipped into a coma after a life-threatening cancer diagnosis.
Then two weeks later, on February 1, his dad Tom – a father-of-three – died in a car crash, while he was working longer hours to pay for his son’s cancer treatment.
Tom Carney’s funeral was last Friday and the family are now worried about breaking the tragic news to Zeek when he wakes up from the coma.
Isaiah, 21, told the situation left his family in “more and more pain”.
“It’s almost been a blur, so much information to process,” he said.
Everything started going wrong for the Carney family on January 15.
That day Zeek, from Albury in southern NSW, was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, a rare blood cancer.
Several hours later “he was literally kicking and screaming in pain” according to Isaiah.
The teenager was struggling to breathe as pressure built up in his lungs and heart.
A helicopter rushed to take Zeek to hospital, and at one point he clinically died during the flight.
Although medical staff were able to resuscitate him, Zeek’s condition was deteriorating rapidly and doctors decided they needed to induce him into a coma and intubate him.
He was flown to The Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, with Zeek’s mother Hailey following in her car.
“They started on chemotherapy for him while he’s in the coma,” Isaiah said.
The hope is that his cancer will be brought to heel by the time he wakes up.
Tom Carney, 50, lived in Gympie in Queensland but raced down to Melbourne to visit his sick son.
A truck driver, he requested more hours to help pay for Zeek’s treatment.
Tom was going back to work on February 1, working a new shift that gave him more pay, when disaster struck.
He “went around the bend and lost control, and ended up in a ditch … collision with another car,” Isaiah said.
Tom died at the scene, after paramedics were unable to revive him.
Isaiah called his dad a “very skilled driver” who had been driving trucks for more than 25 years.
“We still don’t know what’s kind of gone wrong.”
Isaiah remembers catching up with his dad in the Melbourne hospital several weeks ago.
“That was the last time I saw him,” he said.
Doctors have been trying to wake Zeek for the past month, but the family don’t know how to deliver the news of his father’s passing.
“It’s a bit of a tricky one,” Isaiah said.
“Because of the state he’s in, to hear such news as he wakes up, it might have an effect on his physical health as well as his mental health.”
Isaiah’s biggest fear is that Zeek will find out about his dad’s death through social media before the family can tell him themselves.
“He’s a young kid, he’s gonna use his phone, he’ll turn on his phone, it’ll be all his notifications,” he said.
“We don’t want that to be the case. We want to be there. We’ll tell him ourselves.”
With the challenges mounting up, the family are struggling financially and have set up a GoFundMe.
Isaiah’s mum Hailey works as a cleaner but has put that on hold while she spends every day with her sick son.
For a time Hailey was paying for rent on her Albury house while also paying for hotel rooms in Melbourne.
But after getting in touch with the Leukemia Foundation, Hailey has now been put up in a room in a Ronald McDonald House.
Isaiah had worked casually as a furniture removalist but has been too busy travelling between the hospital in Melbourne, the house in Albury, and his dad’s house in Gympie to work many shifts.
There is also one more brother in the family, 23-year-old Zane, but he has two children of his own to support.
To raise money for leukemia awareness, Isaiah is shaving all his hair on March 9. He had raised $1733 at time of writing
