Mom Shares Heartbreaking Reason She Decided Not To Tell Her Terminally Ill Son He Was Dying

Gheuwan Arja, 41, watched as her young son Omar rang a bell in the hospital to mark the end of his cancer treatment.

The mother of five had informed her son, who was turning 10 and also battling Non-Hodgkin lymphoma, that this marked the end of his painful two-month battle.

The mother, from the Sydney suburb of Greenacre, was aware that the treatment had failed and had actually damaged the boy's body irreparably, necessitating 18 surgeries.

Omar was instead sent home to spend his last few months with his devoted family.

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Gheuwan, the mother of Aisha, Rabieh, Mohamad, Omar, and Luay, admits, "Honestly, I thought I'd fix him.”

“I said to the doctors ‘Don’t worry about it, I’ll get rid of his cancer’.”

Gheuwan never revealed to Omar that he was battling cancer.

She also avoided telling him about his past struggle with a brain tumor.

Instead, he thought he had been battling illnesses both times.

This was because the mother had seen the pain of seeing her kid suffer before.

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Gheuwan, who was 23 at the time, and her husband Fadi, who was 28 at the time, welcomed their first child, Aisha, in 2005.

They were “over the moon”.

“You do not know what true love is until you have your first child,” Gheuwan tells 7Life.

However, a rare, genetic condition known as Niemann-Pick disease type C, which disrupts the body's capacity to metabolize fat (cholesterol and lipids) with cells, was discovered in the couple's infant.

As Aisha grew, she developed her own "awesome" personality, thus the sickness hadn't been doing much harm.

She also took on the role of big sister to the couple's first son, Rabieh.

“She was very cheeky. Her smile was on another level,” the mum says.

“She was very, very attached to her father, more than me. Her dad was her everything.”

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However, the sickness started to affect the young girl's brain when she was two years old.

And when she was three, "she stopped talking, walking, stopped eating" and had trouble breathing.

The mother adds that her daughter had to have feeding tubes put into her stomach because of how much it had affected her. "(It) really took a toll on her," the mother says.

A feeding tube, however, was accidentally placed into her lungs in 2009.

The young child was hospitalized with pneumonia and given a CPAP machine to help her breathe.

“They were telling us to say our goodbyes to her that day,” Gheuwan says.

“Then she saw her father … and she did this raspberry when they breathe this breath of life and life comes back into them.”

Aisha was taken home three weeks later with all the equipment she required and resumed her fight there.

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She died in her bed eight months later, at the age of just four, surrounded by her devoted family.

“I think her dad was her strength. She fought for us to stay a little bit longer,” Aisha died on February 23, 2009, according to the mother.

“She was my first love and my first heartbreak.”

Gheuwan and Fadi learned they were expecting their third child five months after Aisha died.

“I think for me that sort of, not helped me heal, but it was like a distraction,” Gheuwan says.

The couple welcomed Mohamed in 2010 together with Rabieh, the big brother-to-be.

“I remember looking at him when he was born and just screaming out, ‘Oh my god he looks exactly like her (Aisha)‘,” Gheuwan says.

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Being "the cheekiest, most misunderstood kid ever" as he grew up, Mohamed discovered a passion for sports, notably "footy" (rugby league).

The young man, who is in good health and shape, became a big brother when Gheuwan and Fadi welcomed their sons Omar and Luay in 2011 and 2015, respectively.

Mohamed spent the day in 2019 with his family at a beach in Cronulla, where he played and swam with his brothers and cousins. Mohamed was nine years old at the time.

“He had finished a swim and I saw him limping to one side,” Gheuwan remembers.

“As he was walking to me, he tripped over. He was talking to me, and he was slurring.”

“We called an ambulance. (They) came and thought he was having a stroke.”

“At this point (Mohamed) was so excited, like he’s sitting in the ambulance with the sirens on and he’s loving life.”

“We didn’t know what was coming.”

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“I was freaking out. Like, how does a nine-year-old have a stroke?”

The nine-year-olds brain tumor was discovered via an urgent MRI, which prompted doctors to take a biopsy.

“The last thing he said to me was, ‘Mum, I’m hungry. I need to eat and I want to eat Hungry Jacks’,” she remembers.

“And I said to him, ‘Look when you come out of your surgery, I’ll get you Hungry Jacks, whatever you want’.”

But Mohamed wasn't waking up after the surgery.

However, they cautioned that there was a less than 1% chance of survival before beginning radiation and chemotherapy.

And even with this painful and uncomfortable treatment, he would only have five weeks remaining.

“Why would I put my son in pain and do radiation and chemo, and he’s going to die,” Gheuwan says.

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“They’re telling me there’s no hope.”

The parents were informed that Mohamed would die 12 days after the brain tumor was found.

“It was his brother (Luay’s) birthday. I started screaming at him, ‘You’re not passing today’,” she says.

“He couldn’t even hear me. I go to him, ‘You’re not going to pass’.”

Later that night, Mohamed slipped away. Nearly ten years had passed after Aisha's passing on February 3, 2019, at that time.

“Before he did, I kissed him, I kissed him, kissed him, kissed him,” Gheuwan remembers.

“I go, ‘Whenever you’re ready, go be with your sister. I love you.”

After Mohamed passed away, medical professionals learned that he had mismatch repair syndrome, a hereditary disorder that raises a person's risk of getting several cancers.

To determine whether they shared the ailment, all of Gheuwan and Fadi's children had to undergo testing.

Rabieh and Luay both felt fine.

However, Omar, age 9, was under supervision since he had the syndrome.

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Omar's brain tumor was discovered in December 2019 - the same year he lost his sibling Mohamed.

While his mother engaged in holistic healing, he received radiation for six weeks.

Gheuwan never revealed to her son that he had a tumor; rather, she claimed that the condition was being treated as an ear infection.

“I had a couple of nurses telling me that I should tell him,” the mum says.

“I told the hospital, ‘The minute you tell him he has cancer, my son’s not going to fight to survive, because he’s seen his brother pass away’.”

“He didn’t question it, he went in for his radiation. The tumor went within six weeks.”

Omar underwent routine MRIs every three months after receiving radiotherapy, and the tumor never returned.

Until Omar's Non-Hodgkin lymphoma diagnosis in June 2021, the family appeared to be in the clear.

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Omar would undergo two months of rigorous chemotherapy, despite the mother's instinct telling her "No, don't do chemo, don't do chemo."

The torturous treatment caused the young youngster a number of problems.

“Three weeks into chemo, his intestines exploded and then they had to do an eight-hour surgery,” Gheuwan says.

Every time they would stop and restart the chemotherapy, Omar would feel excruciating pain.

“He never complained of pain, so when Omar complained of pain, you needed to believe him,” the mum says.

“He was like a man. He would never tell you he was in pain. I called him ‘my little man’... very strong man.”

Doctors stopped chemotherapy after two months and started looking for alternatives.

“He (the head doctor) called Paris, called Toronto, called all these countries to see if there was any other way to treat him. There wasn’t,” Gheuwan says.

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“They were like, ‘We’re not going to do this anymore. We’re not going to do chemo, he has to go home and spend time with his family.”

“That was the day he rang the bell ... I told him he had finished and he was going home.”

The mother made every effort to discover holistic treatments for her kid, including black seed and CBD oils.

“They told me he wasn’t going to recover to walk. I made him watch a lot of (reality TV show) SAS to keep him mentally strong,” the mum says.

“He started getting up and walking again.”

The side effects of chemotherapy, though, were too severe.

“Chemo had already destroyed his body ... the heart wasn’t working properly, his kidneys weren’t working properly,” she explains.

Omar died on January 14, 2022. He was ten years old.

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“I knew that he was going to go, and I started praying and saying, ‘God please make it quick for him, don’t let him suffer’,” Gheuwan says.

“I don’t think he was suffering. They had him sleeping and he passed away with his father (at his side).”

“When reality kicked in, I collapsed - I had hope until the last day - I never thought that was going to happen.”

Gheuwan feels the psychological toll of losing three children.

However, the mother goes to great lengths to avoid "the dark place."

“It takes so much work that no one sees. Everyone is like, ‘Oh she’s so strong’,” she says.

“I wake up at five in the morning, I go for a walk on the beach, I do research on how to heal mentally.”

“You’re never the same again, and I’m not the person I was.”

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“Nobody matters but my family now, I want to spend as much time and do things with my kids as much as I can because I want to appreciate them.”

“I pray a lot, and I ask God to always give me a positive mindset. For me, that was a big thing, my faith.”

“I know they’re all together, I know God guaranteed them to heaven.”

Other parents should be aware that "life does go on," the mother said.

“Don’t give up on life. You do go through things in life but life is still beautiful,” she says.

“You want your children to fight for life - how dare you give up on life. Don’t - that’s how I see it.”

“If my son fought for his life how dare I give up on mine.”

Aisha, Mohamed, and Omar will always have a special place in the hearts of Gheuwan, Fadi, now 46, Rabieh, 16, and Luay, 8.

“Every one of them was special, they all had something about them,” Gheuwan says.

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“They gave us all the love, they were love itself.”

“I always tell them I love them before I go to sleep.”

With Rabieh and Luay, she is "making the most memories" she can.

“You don’t know when your last photo’s going to be with your child,” she says.