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A brush with fate

A new toothbrush saved my daughter's life...


Published by: Jean Jollands
Published on: 13 October 2011

P erched in the Tesco trolley, my two-year-old daughter Katie looked up at me excitedly. She'd been watching a little girl picking out a new toothbrush. ‘I want one, Mummy!' she beamed.
It was red, and the teddy bear at the bottom lit up for two minutes so you knew how long to brush their teeth for.
‘Please?' she begged, staring up at me with those gorgeous big, blue eyes of hers.
It was on offer at 99p...
‘Oh... okay,' I smiled.
Back home, Katie was quick to show it off to my hubby Karl, 32, a railway engineer, and her big sister Jordan, 12. And, at bedtime, she couldn't wait to try it out. ‘You have a go first, then Mummy will take over,' I beamed, turning off the bathroom lights so she could see the toothbrush light up.
But as Katie brushed away eagerly, I spotted something strange in her reflection.
As the toothbrush flashed, a weird line of light appeared across Katie's left eye, making it look
like a cat's eye.
Worried, I took Katie downstairs, flashing a torch in her eye to show Karl what I'd seen.
‘What is it?' he frowned.
‘I don't know?' I said. ‘I'm going to look on the internet.'
‘It could be anything from eye disease to cataracts,' panicked Karl, reading over my shoulder.
‘Or cancer,' I gulped. ‘We need to get Katie to hospital.'
There, doctors studied her eye with a high-tech camera before leading us into a side room.
‘Katie has retinoblastoma, there's a cancerous tumour in her left eye,' explained the doctor.
Please, no. Then I saw the tears gather in Karl's eyes.
‘The tumour develops in the retina, the light-sensitive lining of the eye. That's why it showed up in the light from the toothbrush.'
It affected 40 to 70 children each year, and usually developed by the time they were five.
‘We're going to have to remove Katie's left eye,' the doctor said.
I felt sick. ‘Can't you try chemotherapy?'
‘I'm sorry, it's too late for that.'
The cancer, in fact, was spreading through her eye and the tumours could treble in size in just 10 days. And, when the doctor showed us a scan of Katie's eye riddled with tumours, I realised there was no choice.
Doctors also discovered the cancer had destroyed her sight
in that eye.
So, they'd remove the eye and scoop out all the cancer they could, then insert a conformer, a temporary plastic shell, to keep the shape of Katie's eyelids until a prosthetic eye was fitted.
Jordan paled when we said her little sister would lose her eye. ‘Will she still be the same?' she asked.
‘Yes, she'll still be our Katie,'
I reassured her.
Though Katie knew she had a poorly eye, it wasn't until the morning of the operation that I told her she was going to lose it.
‘The doctor has a magic wand with sparkles,' I began, voice cracking. ‘And he's going to wave it and pop, he's going to take your eye away and make you better.'
‘Will my eye fall on the floor?' she grinned innocently.
‘No, the doctor will catch it.'
When she came round after the three-and-a-half hour operation, my little girl was dosed up on pain-killing morphine, with a massive eye patch where her eye should have been.
‘The operation went smoothly,' the doctor announced. ‘But we'll need to send the eye off for tests to discover the extent and nature of the cancer.'
We agreed to donate the eye to medical research afterwards.
It was three days before Katie's eye patch came off, and I baulked when I saw her blackened and bruised eyelid swollen shut. She was in so much pain and, as she clutched her favourite pink bunny cloth, I'd have done anything to swap places with her.
But my girl was a toughie and, three days later, came home.
As she slowly healed, and got back to her normal self, I started taking her out.
Going around the supermarket, an elderly man spotted her bruised face. ‘Did you have a nasty fall?' he asked.
‘No,' Katie replied confidently. ‘I got cancer and the doctor took my eye out with a wand.' I couldn't help smiling and neither could the man!
Two weeks later, it was time to have Katie's temporary prosthetic fitted. The fake iris was shades darker than her right eye. And now, my little girl, who used to love brushing her teeth in the mirror, shied away from her reflection.
When it was time to fit a more realistic prosthetic, I froze as the consultant opened a drawer full of shiny, marble-like false eyes with painted-on pupils.
‘I-I've got to learn how to pop Katie's eye in and out,' I told Karl.
‘But then think what Katie's been through, it's a small price to pay,' he reasoned. And he was right - if she could get through this, I could, too.
Four months on, Katie's back to her cheeky self. Soon, she'll get her own custom-made false eye.
Because she has no sight in her left eye, she often bumps into things, but Jordan follows her around, trying to keep her from harm. When Katie starts school though, she'll need a special support worker.
We don't know yet if there's a chance the cancer could ever attack the right eye, but the signs look good. It's weird to think a simple toothbrush saved my girl's life - but what a miraculous stroke of luck!

• Visit the Childhood Eye Cancer Trust website at www.chect.org.uk


Rebecca Poultney, 30, Coventry, West Midlands