How winning racehorse 'changed everything' for girl with cancer

 

How winning racehorse 'changed everything' for girl with cancer

When five-year-old Betsy had an ear infection, stomach pain and fever, her GP put it down to a virus. But Betsy's mother Charlotte had a gut feeling something was very wrong.

Betsy was taken to A&E with stomach pain, and a food intolerance was suspected.

But Charlotte began to research her daughter's symptoms and approached her GP again - this time querying leukaemia, and they agreed to do some blood tests.

"I was desperate... it was complete panic... I knew that there was something wrong," she recalls.

"She was fatigued, her personality had changed, she didn’t want to play with her friends or her sister any more."

Within days of Betsy's blood tests, in February 2023, Charlotte received a phone call asking her to take Betsy to the Princess of Wales Hospital in Bridgend to be given the results.

"For that drive there, I couldn't speak," she remembers.

"Panic set in, that sickness and I remember just shaking, my whole body was trembling until I got to the hospital."

With her horse trainer husband Christian away working in Cheltenham, she and Betsy were ushered into a room where they received the news Charlotte had been dreading.

"I had a gut-feeling, I knew it was going to be [leukaemia].... but it still hit me like a bus," she says.

"I was numb… I remember just standing up and holding onto the bed and not being able to speak, I got that noise in your ear like you see in films and everything sort of stopped."

Betsy was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) and was immediately admitted to Noah's Ark Children's Hospital for Wales in Cardiff, where a play therapist was able to explain the diagnosis to her in a way that she could understand.

Within two days, chemotherapy had started.

"The treatment for leukaemia is very long and very gruelling and the first six weeks are particularly difficult," says Charlotte.

"They're put on a steroid which completely changes their personality and the way that they look and I don't think we were quite prepared for all that."

Betsy interjects with a giggle: "I was really fat."

"She was very, very poorly," interjects Charlotte.

Source: BBC