Skye Hamilton has got cancer. But doctors don't know where it is.

From day one, 27-year-old Skye Hamilton was meant to be a mum. 

“She’s always been the motherly figure,” her brother, Nathan Hamilton, who’s two years younger, told Mamamia. “She was always, out of the three of us siblings, the most caring and would look after all of us the most.”

At 20, Skye and her partner Jacob had their first baby. A boy they named Brooklyn. 

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“With Skye being the first of us to have a baby, it just suited her perfectly, and since then she's been wonderful with all three of her kids," Nathan said. 

“They all love her so much, as do we. That’s why it’s so hard to see her go through this. Like if it was me, perfect, I don't have any kids, it would be fine.”

"She has three young ones that need her.”

Nathan said his sister Skye was just meant to be a mum. Image: Supplied.

"Straightaway, I knew something was wrong." 

It was in July last year that Skye had her third baby, Adalyn — a little sister for Brooklyn, then 6, and Kalyn, then three. But just three hours after giving birth, the mother of three haemorrhaged.

“The next thing we knew, she got rushed into emergency surgery because she was bleeding out internally,” Nathan explained. “The doctor looked at her and was like, ‘We need to go now’.”

While surgeons were able to stop the blood and later discharged Skye from hospital, Nathan said she was “very stressed” that there might be more complications.

Unfortunately, her intuition was right, and in December, tragedy hit the tight-knit family.

“I remember the day, she was getting her nails done actually, and she started feeling a bit funny,” her 25-year-old brother said. 

“So she called me saying I had to come to the shops to pick up her daughter, and straightaway I knew something was wrong.

“I went into the medical centre and she was laying there on the bed, nearly in tears, saying an ambulance was coming. She was trying to pretend to be strong, but I knew deep down that there was something more going on. And she knew it too.”

Because Skye Hamilton is a nurse. A nurse who’d worked on neuro trauma wards. And she knew that her symptoms — pins and needles and numbness on her left side — weren’t a good sign. 

While her family feared that she’d had a stroke, by the time she rushed to the emergency department and had undergone full scans, the answer was much worse. 

“They found a tumour in her brain,” Nathan said. “It was the size of a chicken egg.”

Two weeks before Christmas, Skye had an operation to remove it.
The mother of three underwent brain surgery to remove a chicken egg sized tumour six months after giving birth. Image: Supplied.

“Leading into that surgery, we honestly didn't think we were gonna have her at Christmas given how big the tumour was,” explained Nathan. 

She was awake for the operation, he added, because the surgeons needed to be able to see how much function she might lose. Skye still remembers the doctor speaking to her during the procedure. 

While it was a relative success — doctors had to leave a bit of the tumour in there because she was starting to lose some function — seeing her the day after surgery was hard for Nathan. 

“She's my older sister and seeing her in a state where she was pretty numb to everything... it was like talking to a six-year-old,” he said. “She barely had any vocabulary of function, which was expected after brain surgery and how much they took out.” 

But Skye was determined to get better, and despite being told by her doctors that it was unlikely to happen, she made it home in time for the holidays.

“Christmas Day was pretty emotional for all of us, all together again,” Nathan said. Skye was alive and home for her five-month-old daughter’s first Christmas. It was also the first Christmas without her pop, who’d died a month before she gave birth to Adalyn. 

“It was a major milestone for her just being able to be there,” Nathan said. “So we thought it was all good. She was having regular checkup scans — she was all fine — and then a few weeks ago, she started getting double vision.

“We thought we were free and then we just came crashing back down again.”

Skye (right) was discharged from hospital and made it home just in time for Christmas with her family (pictured with younger brother Nathan and older sister Zoe). Image: Supplied.

“There’s cancer ‘somewhere’ in her body.”

Skye knew immediately that something was wrong and took herself straight to the hospital. 

“They ran scans but the scans didn’t really show much, then they did blood tests and spinal fluid tests and sent some of it overseas to try to confirm the diagnosis,” Nathan explained. 

“We were getting told it was MS (multiple sclerosis) one day, then we were getting told it was cancer the next day. It was just chopping and changing depending on the day. We got told multiple different diagnoses, and even now we still don't know.” 

One thing for certain is that Skye has four new lesions on her brain and brainstem, and cancer “somewhere in her body”.

Listen to the hosts of Mamamia Daily discuss a woman who found out she had cancer on the day of her hens party. Post continues after podcast/ 

“They just don't know where,” Nathan said. “She's had more scans for that, but they still can't pinpoint anything.”

While she’s back on medication for the cancer, Skye has been forced to stop breastfeeding, something that was a “big deal for her”.

“The worst thing was — and this is something no brother wants to hear from their sister — is when she came home from the hospital and the doctors had said, ‘Something's wrong, but we don't know what’,” Nathan told Mamamia. 

“She was like, ‘I'm never going to see my kids grow up, they’re not going to have a mother’. We just both broke down, and I was like, ‘Don’t say that, being the younger brother, you guys [his two sisters] are meant to be okay.” 

"We never thought we'd have to ask for help."

While Skye waits to hear the results from more tests, she’s back at home with her family, while her partner Jacob — who’s been in and out of work — tries to hold them all together. 

Nathan said he was left feeling helpless and that’s when he decided to start a GoFundMe page to help support them. 

“We've always been the family to help others and we never thought we'd have to ask for help,” he explained. “But it was sort of a last resort. I know they need it. So I was like, nope, I'm gonna suck it up and make it for them.”

And since the end of May, he's raised more than $20,000 raised for this heartbroken family. Nathan said he never expected people to be so generous.

“We've always been the family to help others, and we never thought we'd have to ask for help.” Image: Supplied.

“Some of them are family and friends and then people that we haven't been in contact with for a very long time, like friends Skye went to primary or high school with, and then there are more people that have been donating that are complete strangers,” he explained.

“Some of the donations that come through, I start tearing up and Mum starts tearing up, and we're all just in shock. I never thought it would get to the amount it has at all.” 

All of the money raised will go towards soaring medical expenses — as some of the scans needed to try to diagnose Skye’s condition aren't fully covered by Medicare — as well as household expenses and the children's education.

“I never expected to see my sister go through something like this — not knowing an answer or diagnosis — and it’s eating away at her,” Nathan said. “But she's trying not to show it. She’s trying to be strong for the kids.”

But behind her is a tight-knit family and a loving brother who would do anything in this world for his sister. 

If you'd like to donate to Skye Hamilton and her family, you can pledge your support on her GoFundMe page here.

Image: Supplied + Mamamia.

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