Paige Suisted: Doctors in disbelief after woman’s terminal brain cancer tumour disappears

A woman who was told she would never be a mum after being given months to live by doctors, is being hailed a medical “anomaly” after her cancer seems to have just disappeared.

Paige Suisted was horrified to learn she had a brain tumour the size of a golf ball growing inside her skull that would likely kill her within 18 months.

At 26, Paige, who was raised on a farm outside of Hamilton on New Zealand’s North Island, was given 18 months to live by medicos and was heartbroken as the realisation dawned she would never have children and that she would never see her younger siblings grow up.

Paige was diagnosed with stage-four astrocytoma, a terminal brain cancer typically found in children, that was aggressively growing inside her head.

“When they told me, I think I screamed and cried,” she told Daily Mail Australia.

“It was so hard to hear. I have a younger brother and sister, and all I could think about was wanting to see them grow up.”

Just over a year later, and in a miraculous turn of events, doctors are now unable to locate the cancer on scans and think it may have subsided.

At the height of its appearance, the cancer that had already caused paralysis in the entire right side of Paige’s body was quickly shutting down other areas.

Now the tumour cannot be detected, but doctors can’t declare her in remission without further invasive testing.

The only way to confirm if Paige is cancer-free is to perform a biopsy on her brain and remove a small portion, which brings a huge risk of paralysis.

Paige’s current status is that she has no visible cancer in her brain, with doctors actively monitoring in lieu of a brain biopsy.

At just 27, Paige is now stuck in medical limbo with no tumour in sight, but no official remission.

Prior to her diagnosis, Paige’s symptoms were quick and concerning.

“My fingers kind of just stopped working,” she said as the numbness gradually crept up her arm, then down her right leg.

“One doctor said I had a stroke, but didn’t even admit me to the hospital. Another said I had Raynaud’s disease, and one just put me in a sling. They all told me something completely different,” she said after visiting five separate doctors.

Her symptoms mounted, and after her mobility, speech and eyesight deteriorated, she eventually called for an ambulance and pleaded to be admitted to the hospital.

Following CT scans, a lumbar puncture, MRIs and finally a brain biopsy, doctors discovered she had a stage-three astrocytoma, which was upgraded to stage four and terminal a week later.

“It was a 50–50 chance it would work, and a 50–50 chance I’d be fully paralysed, most likely not able to talk or walk again. So, we decided we weren’t doing that,” she said about a possible brain operation to remove the tumour.

“The terminal diagnosis broke a lot of us down. I thought I was going to die, and there’s nothing anyone can do.

“The surgeon said to me, ‘You’re not going to live long enough to be a mother. You needed to be on chemo yesterday.”

After an aggressive round of radiation and chemotherapy, Paige suffered months of physical disability and needed leg and arm casts just to be able to move.

“At the start of chemo, it really shot me down.

“I wasn’t even aware of what was going on,” she said.

A year after her treatment began, she arrived for an appointment in November only to be greeted by doctors who were in total shock at the latest scans.

“In my last few scans, there’s been nothing there. This massive golf ball in my brain … we can’t see any of it on the MRIs,” Paige recalls.

Doctors ordered five specialists, plus her oncologist to review the case but still they have no answers as to why the cancer has disappeared.

“They haven’t had a cancer patient like this. They don’t even understand it themselves.”

“The only way they could find it is by cutting my skull open again. But then they say, why would we cut your skull open when we can see nothing as it is?

“I’m a medical anomaly.”

Paige recently became an ambassador for the Cancer Society, and is working hard on recovering her mobility with physio and gym sessions and celebrated her 27th birthday on top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris recently.