FAMILY AGONY
A MOTHER told how her world fell apart when her two-year-old son was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
Sharon Anderson opened up on the tortuous moment in 2019, when she found out Darragh had childhood cancer, heaping praise on Barretstown for giving him a lifeline.
After a series of chest infections the devastated mum noticed her tiny tot had a cluster of bruises on his back that caused alarm.
Sharon, 48, told us: “He’d been getting a lot of chest infections.
“I wasn’t happy when he had a bath, I took the clothes off, he had these little funny bruises on his back.”
Dad Ken, 48, whisked Darragh straight to South Doc.
She added: “We didn’t have time to bless ourselves. He first went to CUH and then straight to Crumlin. “If he got blood tests a week earlier it might not have shown up, the diagnosis was a silver lining.” Hearing her child had cancer was every mum’s worst nightmare. Sharon said: “We hadn’t time to process it. He was in treatment before we knew what was happening. “All I wanted was to get it out fast. It’s every mother’s worst nightmare because your children are your life. “I had to take it day by day, preparing myself for the worst. He’s such a Taurus. He’s a bull and he took it in his stride. “Kids are so resilient, he was too small to know any different. It was torturous to watch. “He was in a lot of pain. He got mucositis and his mouth all swelled up, a mega cold sore all along his mouth, he was destroyed from that. He still has a little scar, he was tortured from it.” The