It’s not uncommon for parents to find bumps and bruises on their kids, and when one UK mom felt a small lump on her daughter’s cheek while applying sunscreen on her face, she thought nothing of it.
Tracey Payton originally spotted a small lump on her daughter Emma’s face while applying sunscreen on her face during a family trip to Egypt, and figured it was a bug bite. “You couldn’t really see it but it was rock hard, like a pebble, the way that swollen insect bites can sometimes be. It was about the size of a marble. I just thought she’d been bitten in the night,” Tracey said.
“We didn’t think anything of it. She said she had had it for ages and it didn’t hurt, so we weren’t overly concerned. It was just like an insect bite,” Tracey said.
However, the cautious mom took her daughter to the doctor to have it checked out when they returned home, and an MRI scan revealed the ‘insect bite’ was actually a rare form of soft tissue cancer called rhabdomyosarcoma, which had wrapped around her cheekbone.
“When we found out it was cancer my legs were like jelly. Emma was outside the room with the play worker when the consultant told us. I thought, ‘No, it can’t be. This is our child.’ My heart broke into a million pieces,” mom said.
Luckily, the cancer was detected early enough, and Emma underwent facial surgery, chemotherapy, and proton beam therapy, which targets the tumor directly and avoids healthy tissue and organs, to remove and kill the tumor, and has since been in remission.
“Emma gets embarrassed about it now, if people tell her she is amazing or brave. She sees herself as a normal kid who happened to get cancer. She always just got on with it,” Tracey said. “But she is so active and just loves life.”
Would you think to get a bump checked by a doctor if you thought it was just an insect bite? Let us know what you think in the comments below, and please SHARE this with friends on Facebook.
[Featured image credit: Mercury Press]
Doctors Discover ‘Bug Bite’ On Girl’s Cheek Is Actually A Rare Form Of Cancer is an article from: LifeDaily