HAVING one child with cancer would devastate the lives of any family but mum Claire Bicknell faces the horror of two diagnoses.

Her daughters Kaiah, five, and two-year-old Maggie Mae have both beaten totally unrelated versions of the disease – but each faces a high risk of their cancer returning.

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Claire, 36, of Eastwood, Notts, said: “We have been hit by what is literally a stroke of bad luck.

“There’s not a day goes by when I don’t think, ‘Why us? Why my babies?’”

The family were dealt their first blow in July 2019 when Claire became worried about Kaiah’s bloated stomach at five months old.

“It sounds strange but she looked like a little frog,” says Claire. She had her upper body, then she had this very rounded stomach, then her bum and legs.

“Her tummy was always hard and I kept taking her to the GP because instinct told me something was wrong. Then one day I took her out of the car seat and she visibly winced.”

Kaiah was eventually sent to Nottingham’s Queen Medical Centre where paediatricians told Claire her daughter had a childhood kidney cancer called bilateral Wilms tumours.

Claire said: “When the doctors told me I just couldn’t get my head around it. I made this guttural noise that I’ve never heard before, a noise that came right from my gut.

“I was so scared we would lose her.”

‘What have I done?’

Claire and partner Liam, 29, watched helplessly as Kaiah went through a gruelling year of chemotherapy which made her violently sick.

“She was so poorly during chemo that by seven and a half months old, she knew how to grab a sick bowl and vomit in it. It was awful,” said Claire.

Kaiah underwent two operations to remove most of her kidneys and now has the tissue of just one remaining.

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She will need a transplant in the future, and doctors have warned the family there is a 40 to 50 percent chance the cancer will come back, potentially in another part of the body such as the spleen or bladder.

Just as they got used to life looking after Kaiah, Claire fell pregnant with Maggie Mae, who she knew would have Down’s Syndrome at birth.

In July 2022, she gave birth to her bundle of joy who came “kicking and screaming” into the world but, within hours, Claire’s life collapsed for a second time.

She said: “When Maggie Mae was born, the doctors said she was very anaemic and took her away to give her oxygen.

“They came in a couple of hours later to say she had to be ventilated, then again later that morning to tell us she had cancer.

“They had to give my newborn a week of chemotherapy. We had no idea what would happen.”

Maggie Mae was born with a bone marrow condition called TAM (transient abnormal myelopoiesis), which can cause leukaemia.

At one stage, she was so ill that Claire was told to give her daughter a last cuddle because she’d be unlikely to survive but the little fighter pulled through.

She said: “The first thing I said when the doctors told me about Maggie Mae was ‘what have I done?’ I was convinced that I’d done something wrong because I had two children with cancer.

“They said nothing could have been done to prevent either and that it wasn’t my fault.”

Like her big sister, Maggie Mae, who is still tube-fed, faces a risk of the cancer developing again – between 30 and 40 per cent.

While most parents would crumble, Claire and former tree surgeon Liam have tried to remain strong.

Claire said: “There’s many a night I cry but we try to get on with things.

“Liam is an absolute rock and if I’m struggling or having a high anxiety day, he’s always there, reassuring me.

“The way everyone looks at it now is that the girls are here, we’ve had more time with them than we thought we’d have and we live day to day, embracing and loving them.”

The first thing I said when the doctors told me about Maggie Mae was ‘what have I done? I was convinced that I’d done something wrong because I had two children with cancer.

Claire Bicknell

The family are now trying to make memories for the girls’ big brother Jacob, seven, with help from the Family Fund charity.

They have been given grants towards hospital costs and food when Kaiah was seriously ill, a washing machine, garden play equipment and a holiday fund.

Claire said: “If the worst happens we want Jacob to have lovely memories so we’ve had lots of days out as a family thanks to the fund.

“We don’t want his whole life to be about cancer and hospital appointments either and try to have as happy a time as possible.

“With both girls, the hardest thing is not knowing what’s going to happen in the future, so things like the children just playing in the garden together seem magical.”

For more information about the Family Fund log on to: www.familyfund.org.uk

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A FIT and healthy mum who did all the right things to prevent cancer was shocked to hear she had been living with the disease for at least a year.

Natasha McGlinchey, 41, from Norfolk, has since been told her cancer is incurable.

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She has seven inoperable tumours, four of which are in her heart. 

The mum-of-two, aged eight and 10, says she first saw her GP about a lump on her leg in September 2019, more than a year before her diagnosis.

At multiple A&E visits, once more symptoms occurred, she claims she was told the lump must be a symptom of long Covid – despite there being no evidence she’d been infected – or because she was a runner.

But when her lump was discovered to be a tumour with an MRI scan, she was told she had sarcoma cancer over the phone.

“I just thought, ‘That’s ridiculous’,” Natasha recalls. “‘I can’t have cancer. I’m fit and healthy. I’m not even 40’.

“It’s so frustrating because I have this huge amount of guilt that if I had nipped it in the bud straight away, I would be in a much better position than I am right now.”

Natasha was super sporty – she did yoga, took part in triathlons and ran daily.

“I couldn’t have had a healthier diet, a healthier lifestyle,” Natasha, a PE teacher, says. 

“I had stress in my life, but I also did what you would consider all the right things to not get cancer.

“There was never any chilling in front of the telly – we were always on the go.

“I ate a super healthy diet. It was in the back of my mind that if I did all these things, I was going to be lifelong healthy.”

Concerning lump

In 2019, during a sports massage, a therapist pointed out a lump in Natasha’s leg and advised her to see a doctor.

“I went to the GP, who refused to even touch my leg,” Natasha remembers. 

“He just said runners get weird lumps and that it was completely normal.

“He said it would probably be a fatty deposit and that it would go away. 

“He was one of the senior GPs at my practice, so I thought it was fine. 

“He didn’t ask if I had any other symptoms. He didn’t talk about a scan. So off I went.”

The NHS says lumps and swellings are very common and they “do not definitely mean you have soft tissue sarcoma, but it’s important to get checked by a GP”.

A lump – usually deep under the skin, solid, painless and hard – is the most common symptom of soft tissue sarcoma.

Medics in A&E were very dismissive. There was no talk of a scan

Natasha

Natasha’s lump got bigger and bigger, affecting her movement, but she continued to be active during the Covid-19 lockdowns of 2020.

However, when Natasha’s school reopened in September 2020, her colleagues were shocked to see the size of her leg. 

“From the back of my knee to the bottom of my bum, was a massive solid tumour,” Natasha explains. “But obviously at the time we didn’t know what it was.”

Natasha began to feel exhausted and breathless, unable to complete her usual tasks at her job. 

Her GP said it may be a blood clot, and advised her to go to A&E, where Natasha was refused entry because it was the peak of a Covid wave. 

The second time she went, when she was allowed in, the doctors diagnosed her with long Covid, and said she had fatty deposits.

“They were very dismissive,” Natasha adds. “Again, there was no talk of a scan. 

“I’d actually done an antibody test which proved that I didn’t have Covid. I had never had Covid. 

“We were feeling really frustrated because I just couldn’t get better no matter how much sleep I had or how much good food I was eating.”

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Going back to her GP again, Natasha spoke to a locum, who finally sent her for an MRI. 

“I got a phone call from my GP saying, ‘the MRI has come back and you have sarcoma’,” Natasha remembers. 

“I didn’t know what that was because I’d never heard of it. 

“So I said, ‘Okay, fine, what do we do and when can I return to work?’ 

“He said, ‘It’s not as simple as that – it’s a form of cancer’.”

Sarcoma is an aggressive and rare type of cancer that typically begins in the bones or soft tissue. 

Sarcoma accounts for about one per cent of all cancer diagnoses, and Natasha suffers from metastatic myxoid liposarcoma, of which there are only 72 cases a year.

It was stressful and really upsetting because I didn’t want to be retired at 39 years old

Natasha

Two days before Christmas in 2020, Natasha found out the sarcoma had spread.

It was now in her heart and her chest wall and she started chemotherapy within a week.

Natasha says: “I lost all my hair and couldn’t get out of bed.

“My husband had to take me to the toilet and had to help me wash. It was just horrendous.”

The doctors told Natasha that the treatment was not working and that the tumours were not shrinking, so she began five weeks of radiotherapy.

“My consultant said, ‘You’re not going back to work: you need to take ill health retirement because you will need more treatment’,” Natasha explains. 

“’There will be more tumours, you can’t commit to a job. You can’t be a PE teacher anymore because your body can’t cope’.

“That was stressful and really upsetting because I didn’t want to be retired at 39 years old.”

‘Incurable’

Natasha has unfortunately since discovered more tumours on top of those in her heart and chest wall, including near her liver.

She has had to face the reality that her disease is not curable and have palliative chemotherapy and radiotherapy, which leaves her feeling extremely poorly.

As well as the physical burden, she struggles emotionally with her diagnosis and the toll on her children.

“Having children gets me through, gives me hope, gives me a will to get up and do these things,” Natasha says. 

“But it’s also so tricky. How much do you tell them? How much do you involve them?”

Natasha wishes she had pushed her doctor to take her lump more seriously, adding that many GPs are unaware of sarcoma, especially in areas where there are no sarcoma specialists.

“GPs don’t know what sarcoma is,” she says. 

“My advice is if you have a lump anywhere, go to your GP and don’t let it go – you need to have it scanned.

“I left it way too long. I’m a bit of a people pleaser. I don’t like to push. I don’t like to make waves.

“Don’t let things go. Really push. It’s not being rude to your GP.

“You always think, ‘There’s someone worse off than me, there’s someone that needs that doctor appointment more than me’. No, they don’t. 

“As women, we’re ready for breast cancer. We all check our breasts, and we go for smear tests, and we’re conscious that if you find a lump in your breast, you go to the doctor and it will be taken seriously. 

“But if you have a lump in a limb, it seems like it won’t be cancer because you don’t think about that sort of cancer.”

For information on sarcoma, visit Sarcoma UK.

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