Jayda Chamberlain went to hospital with a simple pain in her pelvis.
The Sydney mum never imagined that she would be diagnosed with terminal cancer. Doctors performed a scan on the 22-year-old in March and noticed a large mass.
‘They suspected ovarian cancer and when they went in, they discovered more masses, and sent them off for biopsy,’ Ms Chamberlain’s aunt, Maia Regner, told Daily Mail Australia on Friday.
‘Within a week they had an answer and it wasn’t an answer that we wanted.’
Ms Chamberlain was diagnosed with Desmoplastic Small Round Cell Sarcoma, an extremely rare and aggressive form of cancer.
Only about 200 cases of the variant have been reported since 1989.
Without surgery, doctors said the young mum had less than a year to live – with it, they estimated two to five years.
Ms Regner said it was a shock to hear that her niece had sarcoma because her brother, Jayda’s uncle, had died from the same disease just over two years ago.
Jayda Chamberlain (pictured with nine-month-old son Mack) was diagnosed with stage four Desmoplastic Small Round Cell Sarcoma (DSRC)
Jayda (pictured with her sister Nyah) has stopped taking chemotherapy and her family are exploring alternative options overseas in Thailand or Mexico
‘Supposedly it’s just bad luck,’ Ms Regner said of the new diagnosis.
‘We weren’t remotely thinking sarcoma because we lost our brother to the same thing and we thought, what are the odds?
‘We don’t want to lose someone else. We really hate cancer – it’s taken so much from our family already.’
Ms Chamberlain’s abdomen is full of tumors. One nurse described them as though ‘someone had thrown scattered sand’.
Doctors believe the stage four cancer had developed quickly, within the last nine months, as hospital staff would have noticed it while Ms Chamberlain was pregnant.
Ms Chamberlain first had to undergo chemotherapy with the aim of shrinking the tumors to allow for surgery. But the chemo proved too aggressive.
‘She’s been married for just over a year and she’s got a nine-month-old baby. She doesn’t want to die, she wants to fight, but the chemo has absolutely destroyed her, and she’s not well enough to continue chemo,’ Ms Regner said.
‘We’re basically clutching at straws, we’re desperate to save her.’
Jayda and husband Caleb (pictured with their son Mack) have been married less than a year
The family has launched a GoFundMe with the aim of raising $120,000 to pay for Ms Chamberlain to undergo alternative treatments overseas in Mexico or Thailand.
The young mum has stopped chemo and is living in Sydney with her baby, Mack, and her husband Caleb.
Doctors have now deemed it too dangerous to remove her tumours through surgery.
‘She just wants to be with her baby, so her thing was I want to spend as much time with my son as I can,’ Ms Regner said.
‘She’s 22 – she shouldn’t even have to be thinking about things like dying.’
On Friday, the family had raised almost $43,000 towards their goal of $120,000.
