Rebecca Palul, a 35-year-old mother, decided to share her story in order to make other parents aware of a disease: retinoblastoma. Her daughter, Isla, was diagnosed when she was 15 months old with only subtle symptoms.
It’s a difficult story that this London mother shared in order to raise awareness about a disease that affected her 15-month-old baby girl, retinoblastoma, an eye cancer. These are subtle symptoms that put the flea in the ear of this mother like this 37-week pregnant thirty-something who discovered that she had breast cancer from the color of her colostrum. Now that her three-year-old daughter is on the mend, she chooses to share her story to warn other parents.
Christmas 2020, little Isla is 14 months old, that’s when one of her mothers, Rebecca, notices that her eye moves strangely when she plays. “I remember playing with Isla on the floor, and she looked at a toy, then looked at me. When she looked up, her right eye rolled sideways and back as if it couldn’t focusshe says. Very cautious, she decides to call her general practitioner to check everything, that’s when the ax falls. After weeks of tests, the little girl is diagnosed in January 2021, she is affected by a very rare eye cancer which mainly affects children under the age of six: retinoblastoma.
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Little worrying and subtle symptoms
This mother of two children shares her story, because she wants to educate parents about this disease. At first the situation did not seem worrying to them, indeed she says that she and her wife noticed several times that their daughter’s iris sometimes flickered, but that it remained very subtle. They then assumed that little Isla only had one lazy eye and would probably need glasses later on.
It is in this context that they brought their daughter to have her vision checked. She shares her memory:The nurse put a special pair of sunglasses on Isla. The goggles had only one lens, on the left side. (…) Isla was sitting on my knee, facing me, but with her left eye covered, I could see that her right eye couldn’t focus on anything and was moving all over the place. I remember being really shocked.It was from there that the tests on the little girl started until arriving at her diagnosis.
The doctors did their best to save Isla’s eye and the child started six cycles of systemic chemotherapy, a very painful memory for this mother. “Before they could begin, Isla needed a lumbar puncture and an MRI to make sure the cancer hadn’t spread outside of her eye.Rebecca recalls. During her treatment, the little girl contracted numerous infections and made multiple trips to the hospital, but fortunately today Isla is doing much better and is on the way to recovery: “The tumor is now stable which is amazing [mais] there are tiny tumor seeds that keep appearing and growing in Isla’s eye, so she needed a lot of cryotherapy to treat them.»
The Childhood Eye Cancer Trust also wanted to warn about the most typical signs of retinoblastoma, a white glow that appears under certain lights, strabismus, or even a change in the appearance of the eye.