Teddy, pictured on his second birthday in DecemberAfter I fell pregnant with Teddy, who was born in 2016 I started documenting his journey on Instagram. It was just for friends and family – I only had 400 followers.
I told my Instagram followers that too. It wasn’t an easy decision but I needed to make people aware of the reality of how cancer affects children. “Try explaining to a 16 month old that they can’t have any ‘gotgot’ when they are wildly pointing to the fridge and requesting it,” I told my followers. We were sent straight to A&E at Kings, the same place I’d delivered him, where he had blood tests and it emerged he was anaemic. They also felt a tumour in his abdomen.
We were devastated and in total shock. He needed to be moved straight away to St George’s Hospital in Tooting, south London, but he was too poorly to go immediately.Things quickly went downhill. He was getting thinner and thinner. It was dreadful seeing my lovely little boy like that. The NHS offered the immunotherapy but we raised money through family, friends and strangers to have it at a private, specialist centre in Barcelona, Spain, as they were offering a breakthrough drug which seemed to be getting good results.Teddy cuddles his dad during a day out