When Kayleigh Chapman's 5-year-old daughter Lily-Mae woke up with a cough one morning, she knew right away that it wasn't just a regular cold. She says that Lily-Mae "looked a bit off," and there was a strange-looking bruise or rash on her skin. But when Chapman took her daughter to the local clinic, the nurse who examined her daughter didn't see things the same way.
The 29-year-old mother from the UK said she was made to feel "like a paranoid mum, who was over-reacting but I knew there was something wrong with my daughter."
A nurse-practitioner sent Lily-Mae home, saying that she probably just had a virus, but just days later Chapman found out it was much worse.
Lily-Mae's rash got worse and worse, and Chapman says her "mother's intuition" started sounding the alarm.
She took Lily-Mae back to the clinic, but asked to see a doctor this time. He could tell right away something was wrong with the little girl, and sent her to a nearby hospital for blood tests.
That's where Chapman got the bad news.
Click the next page to find out why this mom is so upset!
Less than 2 hours after arriving at the hospital, Chapman was told that her daughter had acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. The disease is a rare form of the cancer, related to cells in the patient's bone marrow. It's very rare in children, which explains why nobody expected Lily-Mae to have it.
But Chapman is upset by how she and her daughter were treated, and by the fact that nobody spotted the disease sooner.
"She was displaying the symptoms but they weren't spotted," she told the Daily Mail.
"It has made me angry but we're the position that we're in and we have to move on."
Chapman says her daughter can expect 2 years worth of chemo treatments, and she also has to take steroids that are making her moody.
"We are devastated but we've got to stay strong for her," she says.
"What I want to do is raise awareness of how fast it can all happen."
It's not the first time some very small symptoms turned out to be cancer, but hopefully this mom's case will inspire more moms to take their intuition seriously.
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[H/T: The Daily Mail]
