Oamaru sisters Hailey and Tyla Crossan have the same eyes.
Hailey’s are brown and Tyla’s are blue, but a trip to an optometrist a couple of years ago, when the sisters lived in Invercargill, showed they both have the same prescription, the same-shaped eyes, and exactly the same distance between their pupils.
"The optometrist said to me ‘Are you sure they’re not twins?’" their mother Kara Crossan recalls.
"I said, ‘Yeah, I think I would know; they were born a year apart.’"
But last spring, when Hailey (now 18) needed to find a bone marrow donor, she knew it was going to be Tyla (17) who matched her needs.
A routine visit to her Invercargill general practitioner resulted in a blood test that ultimately ended in the worst news.
When the diagnosis came and Mrs Crossan burst into tears it was Hailey rubbing her back and saying ‘It will be all right, Mum.'
"It should have been the other way around, but Hailey’s attitude right from the beginning was ‘OK, I’ve got this — I’m going to beat it. What I need around me is people who are supportive and positive, so if anybody wants to visit me, they can cry before they come and talk to me, they can cry on the way out, but they have to leave their tears at the door."
Hailey was transferred to the Children’s Haematology Oncology Centre (CHOC) at Christchurch Hospital, where she spent much of last year.
She never thought she was going to die, Hailey said.
"I did think some days it would just be easier if I died, because it was so hard. That was my down days."
And, she admits, cancer is scary.
"It is scary, but when I was younger I always related cancer with death. But it’s not. I’ve seen a lot of kids in the CHOC ward; a lot of kids have gone through [and] made it through."
Kara and Tyla have tattoos on the insides of their wrists: two ribbons, one orange and one green, to record the dates when Hailey started treatment in April last year and when she had her bone marrow transplant in November. Between those two dates, there were rounds of chemotherapy and radiation.
And then came the time to look for a bone marrow donor. Tyla and Hailey’s brother Riley (13) were tested, but Tyla had 12 of the 13 markers, almost a perfect match.
And then the treatment started.
"So she’s put into what I can only describe as a glass coffin and around her body is packed bags of rice," Kara said.
"And her whole body goes through radiation treatment — 13 minutes on each side. And she did that twice a day for three days."
"We were in there with her when she was getting packed into the box and we were all helping, packing the rice around the place and as soon as the ‘all clear’ was given we all went back in and unpacked her again.
"We were all with her every step of the way."
For Tyla, the time was nerve-racking. She did not want to let her sister down. She had six holes cut in her back near her hip bones and doctors extracted half of her bone marrow.
"And then afterwards, it was like a waiting game, waiting to see if Hailey was going to take to my bone marrow, whether she was going to reject it, but it was all good."
After the transplant, Hailey became sick with pericarditis — the lining around her heart started retaining fluid.
Emergency surgery was required and it was one of the most harrowing times of the year, Mrs Crossan said.
But again she pulled through, and in January, she was allowed to go home to Invercargill.
Back home the Crossans decided their children and family had to come first so they sold their food business and decided to move back to Oamaru, where Brent was from and where the girls were born. About the same time, The Galley cafe at Oamaru Harbour went on the market and since autumn the family has been running it, with all the children helping out at the cafe around school commitments and recovery. Mrs Crossan said she was "super proud of her children".
And for Hailey, last year changed her "whole outlook on life".
"Everyone always says life is short, but now I’m like ‘Whoa, it is short’."
She has plans to travel, and she has her travel partner picked out — her younger sister Tyla.
"We’re not the same person, because we look different," Hailey says.
"But we have the same insides kind of now, because her bone marrow’s in me. We’ve got the same bone marrow. It’s weird."
