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10. June 2022 – 19:43 watch
Kids get runny noses all the time, right? Colds are almost part of the standard repertoire for the little ones. But little Mia’s cold isn’t part of a cold, it’s the first sign of blood cancer!
Where did Mia get all those bruises from?
Mia is seven months old when her mother, Anja Caulton, notices her runny nose. But as “JamPress” reports, she wasn’t too worried at the time. Only when Mia comes to a day-care center, constantly has a cold and high temperature, does Anja start to wonder. “I was pretty worried because she always had a cold and cried a lot,” she tells NeedToKnow.online, “but everyone told me it was like that at the daycare center because Mia was building her immune system.” In retrospect, she seemed very ill even then.
Little by little, Anja notices other things about her daughter that she finds very funny. A bump below her ribs, which she first mistakes for a mosquito bite. Then the many bruises that make the mother believe she is hugging her child too tightly. Or do the hematomas come from the day-care center? “A thousand terrible thoughts went through my head,” says Anja. That’s the moment when Anja and her husband finally take Mia to the doctor. He does a blood test and finds out: The child has too few blood platelets, hence the many bruises. Mia was also very pale at the time and had red spots everywhere, her mother recalls. That’s why Mia is taken straight to the isolation ward in the hospital – her immune system is already very weak at this point.
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Then the shock diagnosis: It’s cancer!
Two weeks pass before Mia and her family finally get a diagnosis: Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL). According to the “Information Portal on Cancer in Children and Adolescents”, around 490 children develop ALL in Germany every year. The first signs are usually inexplicable fever attacks, swollen lymph nodes and bruises.
A period of uncertainty follows for the Caulton family and dozens of cancer treatments for Mia, including chemotherapy, blood transfusions and bone marrow surgery. “It was a life-changing time,” says Anja. All parents assume that their children will outlive them. For a while, Mia isn’t sure if she will. Despite her illness and therapy, Mia experienced all the milestones that make the first year of life so special: her first birthday, her first words, her first steps, the first Christmas and New Year.
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And the little one turns out to be a true fighter. Mia braved cancer for 18 months until she was finally cancer-free in March 2020 – three years after the diagnosis. Her parents now support Birmingham Children’s Hospital and the charity Blood Cancer UK to raise awareness of childhood cancer. According to Anja, the two facilities “have given us the greatest gift of all, because now we can see our beautiful daughter growing up and she can enjoy being a child.” (jbü)