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Lita's story

“Lita is my daughter and last year at the age of 13 was diagnosed with a brain tumour”

Lita was diagnosed with a brain tumour that was 10cm by 8cm by 8cm in her frontal lobe, the tumour had probably been there for years and took up around 60% of her brain pushing through her sinus cavity as well.

She was misdiagnosed various times from around 9 months before it was found, even being misdiagnosed with bells palsy when one side of her face drooped when she was violently sick a few weeks before and I called ambulance for her to go hospital as it looked like she has a stroke. The ambulance service didn’t take her as they said she had sick bug, her vision started to fade 8 months after that with having some sickness episodes in between that time. After continuous visits to the Opticians, they said there was nothing wrong with her sight and maybe she just wanted glasses like her sister. The Optician had looked at her optic nerves, which were fine and there was no prescription there (this happened over the space of another month).

Lita was taken to the Opticians on a number of occasions. After another Opticians visit, she was referred to hospital for a CT scan, which revealed Lita had a brain tumour.

I wasn’t happy with what he was saying so we kept going back. He said he would refer her to hospital but as it wasn’t urgent it would take a while to get appointment even went back to doctors this point as well and he said same thing ! We finally got seen by another Optician and she put the drops in her eyes (which is what the first Optician should have done to start with). She saw that both her optic nerves were squashed and sent us to Stoke hospital. They then gave her a CT scan and saw the giant brain tumour and sent by ambulance to Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. We were at Alder Hey for a month and they performed a 17 hour operation to remove the brain tumour, which is when they told us she wouldn’t have lasted another week.

Lita’s brain scan, showing the brain tumour she was diagnosed with.

After they removed the brain tumour, Lita was in intensive care. Finally she started to recover and she came home. She had to go back to hospital to remove the second part of the tumour from her sinus cavity, which was another 5 hour operation. The tumour come back as a meningioma grade 2 atypical, which is very rare for a child to have. Lita has recovered well and she has has gone from having scans every 8 weeks to every 16 at the minute, but has damage to her brain in the frontal lobe. Because of the damage caused, she has some behaviour issues and is quite forgetful. Everyday we pray that her scans stay clear.

Written by Lita’s mum, Emma.