A year on from her young son Obi’s brain tumour diagnosis, Erin McNaught has given a happy update on his health.
“Obi is absolutely thriving. He’s hitting all his milestones,” the model told Stellar in a new interview.
“His chat is hilarious, he can say heaps of words, but for the most part, it’s total gibberish, then he’ll go, ‘I want to sit now’.
“It’s always nerve-racking in the lead up to his next MRI, which is coming up [this week]. But there’s nothing we can do about it. If the tumour has come back, it has come back.”
In June last year, the 44-year-old revealed that Obi, who she shares with fiancé Stasi Kotaras (a music producer also known as Stace Cadet), had been diagnosed with atypical Choroid Plexus Papilloma, a very rare type of brain tumour.
“I haven’t really been able to look back through my photos of around [that] time last year because I couldn’t bear to see pictures of him before we had taken him to the hospital,” McNaught reflected.
“I just feel so, so guilty that he was in so much pain, and we didn’t know. But the other day I got the guts to look [back on that time] and he was still giggling and smiling and pretty happy, and then within a week he was really uncomfortable,” she continued.
“He had started tilting his head to the side. He’d completely gone off food, he’d stopped rolling over, and had stopped basically trying to do anything. At first we put it down to, ‘Oh, maybe he’s about to learn a new skill’ – sometimes they forget one skill while they’re learning another.
“But it became quite apparent that this wasn’t just a normal regression, that this is something more serious.”
McNaught also paid tribute to the nurse who she believes helped save the then seven-month-old’s life after Obi was scheduled to have brain surgery.
“We had this incredible nurse called Claire, who advocated for us,” she revealed.
“She said ‘No, he needs to have an EVD put in’ – an external ventricular drain because he had hydrocephalus, which is swelling of the brain as a result of the cerebrospinal fluid not being able to drain since the tumour had started blocking that passage.
“Obi had an emergency EVD put in that evening, and it was immediate – the relief and the improvement. I genuinely believe if it hadn’t been for Claire, he wouldn’t have made it to the surgery on Saturday morning.”
To read the full interview with Erin McNaught in Stellar, click here.