Girl’s life saved by hairdresser who spotted a brain tumour
A TEENAGE girl had life-saving surgery to remove a brain tumour after an eagle-eyed hairdresser spotted the growth while giving her a hair-do.
Chloe Wickham, 17, was having her hair restyled at home when mobile hairdresser Karen Gammon found a lump on her head.
Karen advised Chloe and her mother Julie to get the flat, eggshaped growth checked out.
Doctors initially dismissed it as just abnormal bone but a scan later revealed it was a tumour.
Surgeons operated on Chloe for five hours to remove the tumour, which was confirmed as a non-cancerous growth between two layers of her skull.
Frightening
The art and design student was told it could have been a lot worse had Karen not spotted it.
She said: “It’s just that word tumour – it’s so frightening. One minute I was a carefree teenager, the next I was frightened I might have cancer.
“I am so grateful to Karen for noticing it while she was cutting my hair. If she hadn’t, it would have got bigger and may have been more difficult to remove.”
Karen, who cut Chloe’s hair at her home in Barnstaple, Devon, said: “When I parted Chloe’s hair I saw a lump like half a peach stuck on. “It was hard. “I didn’t want to scare her but I’d never seen anything like it in more than 25 years of hairdressing and told Julie to get it checked out.”
Chloe first went to the GP in November 2016 but it was thought it was just an abnormal part of her skull. Karen added: “I was devastated when Julie told me Chloe had a tumour but also relieved that I’d spotted it.
“It hadn’t been there when I’d cut her hair six weeks before, so it must have grown quickly.”
In a sad twist, Chloe’s French exchange student friend Agathe Rios had been diagnosed with a brain tumour months before the discovery and died in May last year at the age of 16.
In memory of Agathe, Chloe’s father Roger and other cyclists will ride 700 miles from Barnstaple to Agathe’s home city, Lyon, in September to raise awareness and funds for the Brain Tumour Charity and the Centre Leon Berard, a specialist cancer hospital in Lyon.