Man attacked outside Metro during robbery
A NURSERY worker with a rare swelling condition has opened up about the cruel taunts from a school bully that left her confidence shattered.
Molly Cuthbert was born with lymphoedema, which causes swelling of her left leg, right arm and the left side of her face, “like a zigzag” across her body.
Growing up, the 21-year-old said she was self-conscious about her condition and would “try my hardest” to hide her arm from other people.
And when a school bully started branding her “gorilla hand” and other cruel nicknames, her confidence reached such a low she didn’t want to go to school at all.
When Molly, of Stocksfield, Northumberland, was first diagnosed her parents were told there was nothing that could be done about her lymphoedema and she would have to wear specially made shoes and clothes her entire life.
But although the condition can’t be cured, Molly says compression bandages and treatment to manage it have allowed her to lead a normal life and has spoken out about how her condition is “what makes me, me”. Although Molly was born with lymphoedema, which affects around 200,000 people in the UK, it wasn’t noticed until she was a few days old. She said: “My auntie, who was a midwife, came to visit me and noticed the swelling in my hand and mentioned to my mum and dad that it was something they should get looked at. “I wasn’t given a diagnosis for some time, and was frustratingly told at a hospital appointment that there was nothing that could be done to help my lymphoedema. “My parents were told I would have to have shoes specially made and clothes altered, that I wouldn’t be allowed to play in the garden, but they were determined they weren’t going to cotton-wool me that much.”
Molly’s parents, David and Helen, encouraged her to have as normal a childhood as possible, and she has no memories of her condition being noticed until she was around 12 years old.
“There was a lad in the year below me who bullied my brother. I went to stick up for him one day and this lad just turned round to me and said, ‘shut up gorilla hand.’
“After that it went on for weeks – every time he walked past me he would make little comments and call me things like ‘fat fingers.’ “I remember getting really upset and not wanting to go to school, or not wanting to walk to school by myself because I would have to meet his group of friends on the way there. “It didn’t stop until my mum spoke to the lad’s mum outside school. She had no idea and she was absolutely mortified, she made him apologise to me.” Molly said the bullying made her suddenly very conscious of her lymphoedema. “It caused me lots of upset and confidence problems. “Up until that point I’d never known any different, but that’s when I started thinking, ‘is this what it’s going to be like forever, am I really that different?” Molly has been visiting Newcastle-based St Oswald’s Hospice’s lymphoedema clinic since the age of nine and has been given arm and leg compression garments to help manage the condition. She said: “Coming to the clinic helped me to learn that I am not the only one with this condition. “The older that I got the more I realised that my lymphoedema makes me different and there’s nothing the matter with being different.” Molly Cuthbert A robbery victim had to be taken to hospital after he was attacked at a Metro station in South Tyneside.
A 29-year-old man was approached by a group of people at the Tyne Dock station in South Shields at 9pm on Friday.
The group, who he did not know, verbally abused him and then punched and kicked him.
A small quantity of cash was stolen from the victim, and police are treating it as a robbery.
The man was taken to hospital with serious but not life threatening injuries. He has since been discharged. Three men aged 35, 20 and 18 have been arrested on suspicion of robbery and have been released on police bail.