Girl of 8’s insect bite turns out to be rare cancer
AS Tracey Payton rubbed sun cream into her eightyear-old daughter’s cheek on holiday, she thought she felt an insect bite.
But the lump turned out to be a rare form of cancer that could have been fatal.
Emma, now ten, was forced to have a nine-hour operation to remove the tumour – before weeks of groundbreaking therapy in the US to prevent it returning.
Teaching assistant Mrs Payton said: ‘We went on holiday to Egypt when she was eight. On the first day I was putting sun cream on her face and found a lump on her right cheekbone near her ear. She said she had had it for ages and it didn’t hurt, so we weren’t overly concerned. It was rock hard, like a pebble, the way that swollen insect bites can sometimes be. I just thought she’d been bitten in the night.’
When they went home to Stock- port, Emma, who has a twin brother Ben and sister Holly, was seen by her GP who suspected a blocked saliva gland.
She needed an ultrasound at Wythenshawe Hospital, Manchester, followed by an MRI scan before a needle biopsy to identify it as a rare cancer called rhabdomyosarcoma.
Mrs Payton said: ‘When we found out it was cancer my legs were like jelly. I thought, “No, it can’t be. This is our child.”
‘My heart broke into a million pieces. When I broke the news to Emma, she was petrified. I didn’t want her to be scared of the word cancer. She is a big Harry Potter fan, so I told her cancer was just a word people are scared of, like Voldemort.’
The tumour measured just over
‘I didn’t want her to be scared’
an inch and was wrapped around her cheekbone. After the operation in January 2014, Emma needed chemotherapy and a bone and muscle graft from her neck to reconstruct her cheek.
‘It left a big scar down the side of her face and she has a dent in her cheek where they removed some muscle mass,’ her mother said.
The family was told Emma could have NHS funding for proton beam therapy in Oklahoma and the family flew out for eight weeks of treatment.
The centre had a bell patients rang when they finished treatment and the family has worked to buy 59 bells for hospitals. ‘It’s our way of saying thank you,’ Mrs Payton said.