Parents always want to take perfect care of their children, but when something is medically wrong with them, they have to turn to doctors for help.
We are all socialized to trust doctors. For the most part, that's a good thing, as doctors know much more than regular people about medical problems. It's always best to trust our doctors.
Sometimes, though, our instincts tell us when something is wrong, and there's nothing stronger than a mother's instinct.
When 6-year-old Darcey Fletcher had a terrible headache, her mom Chrissy took her to the doctor's, where she was told it was only a headache.
Chrissy thought it was something more serious, so she took Darcey to two other doctors. They told Chrissy the same thing.
But Chrissy still felt that something else was going on, and Darcey's headache wasn't going away. That's when Chrissy brought Darcey to the hospital.
[H/T: Mirror]
After three different doctors told Chrissy that her 6-year-old daughter Darcey just had a headache, Chrissy had a feeling that something was still wrong.
Chrissy remembered a leaflet that she'd gotten from her optician on child brain tumors, so she went to find it.
When she looked at the symptoms listed on the leaflet, she was shocked at what she saw.
Chrissy told Mirror, "When I was looking at the checklist I was thinking, yes, yes, yes, checking off all the symptoms it listed, bar one — epilepsy."
She continued, "The thing is: the doctors would not give her the scan and just dismissed it as a migraine without even looking. But then I just could not believe my eyes when the symptoms on the card matched up."
Once she read the symptoms, Chrissy took Darcey to the hospital. There, they discovered a serious brain tumor the size of an orange.
Doctors told Chrissy that Darcey would have been dead within a week if she hadn't realized something else was wrong.
Now Chrissy has a message for other parents:
I say to other parents you need to persist and keep pushing doctors for scans — if I’d have listened to those GPs then my beautiful daughter would be dead.
We were told that without surgery she would have definitely died within a week — I just couldn't believe it, it was shocking.
But then I think back and think how lucky we were — now all I want to do is spread the awareness to other mums so they don’t have to go through it.
Darcey had two surgeries after the hospital admitted her: one to remove fluids in her brain, and another one four days later to remove the tumor.
Now Darcey is completely healthy and has a routine MRI scan every six months.
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