Tauranga mum's terror: 'I'M TRAPPED IN THE BODY OF A 90-YEAR-OLD'

Once vibrant and energetic, she’s often bedridden with an now active tumour

- HAYLEY MCLARIN

Being told that the tumour inside your body is stable and isn’t growing – that there are no other worrying lumps, so your case isn’t urgent – should bring a sigh of relief. Normally, that would be a positive outcome.

But for Rebekah Stuart, the diagnosis has brought many more months of being almost bedridden, waiting to reach the top of the surgeon’s list, so she can learn for sure that the tumour in her adrenal gland isn’t cancerous.

And even when she gets to that stage, the 29-year-old Tauranga mum won’t know if she’ll ever get her old life back – one where she isn’t felled by chronic fatigue, no longer able to live a full life as a wife and mother.

“It’s a bit of a sob story,” Rebekah tells Woman’s Day, recovering on the couch from our shoot. “This tumour may not take my life, but it might take my house and it has already taken a couple of years from my family. The life I had has gone.”

It was in August 2018 that the formerly vibrant and energetic young woman was struck with a debilitating fatigue that left her unable to work or spend quality time with her son Levi, now eight.

Rebekah recalls, “I started to feel constantly exhausted. I have a double major degree and had a meaningful job working in HR. I tried to work through it, but a few months down the track, I had to cut down to part-time for a few months – then I had to call it quits completely.”

Her usual fitness regime – weight training at her home gym, going running and biking with Levi – became a distant memory, with that energy and drive replaced by lethargy to the point where most of her days were spent in bed.