Family's 'living nightmare' as daughter diagnosed with illness on 11th birthday

Daily Mirror

4 days ago

Gordon and Gemma Blair said they took their then 10-year-old daughter to the hospital after she took a 'knock' to her left leg during a football match - but she received devastating news on her 11th birthday
A family said they are in a "living nightmare" after their seemingly "fit and healthy" girl was heartbreakingly diagnosed with cancer on her 11th birthday. Gordon and Gemma Blair said they started to notice something wrong with their then 10-year-old daughter Millie after she took a "knock" to her left leg during a football match, last summer.
Sports-loving Millie had fallen and hurt herself before but this time her parents noticed something different with her recovery. The youngster usually recovered quickly but Millie started "limping" and her pain wouldn't go away. The parents took her to the hospital but they received shocking a diagnosis they never expected to hear.
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Doctors initially thought Millie, from Cambridge, could have broken her leg while playing sports but a series of tests and scans revealed something far more sinister. The family were called on the girl's 11th birthday and told she had osteosarcoma - a form of bone cancer that usually affects children. She has since spent more than 100 nights in hospital and had to have one of her legs amputated.
Gordon, a detective inspector for Cambridgeshire Police, said: "Finding out your kid has cancer is the worst feeling imaginable. Your whole world implodes in an instant. It's something no parent should have to go through.
"Suddenly, we were thrust into this scary world of unknowns, spending our days in hospitals with tubes and machines and procedures. It's an awful place to be. This time last year we were just a normal, loving family and life was good, life was easy."
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The dad said his family longed to go back to the life they had before Millie's devastating diagnosis, saying: "We should be sitting around the dinner table together on an evening, laughing, joking, arguing – doing what families do. Instead, we're separated in a living nightmare."
Gordon says the news came as a huge surprise to the family - as Millie, a talented horse rider and promising young footballer who played for Oundle Town and Peterborough United Academy, was rarely ill. He added: "The diagnosis was a huge, huge shock. Millie had been an otherwise healthy kid, with a 100 per cent attendance record at school. She was fit and active and rarely ill."
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As part of Millie's ongoing treatment, she had her left leg amputated above the knee in January. The 11-year-old therefore needs a prosthetic leg but her family said they were not able to get a a specialist one, for sports, through the NHS.
Her family says Millie will also need specialist rehabilitation and these could cost over £130,000. Gordon and Gemma, and their older daughter Jessica, 15, have taken it into their own hands and launched a GoFundMe page and organised a fundraiser to give her "the opportunities she deserves" and allow Millie to carry on with her love for sports.
The dad will join a team of 30 people to complete an 88-mile walk from Peterborough United's football grounds to Stamford Bridge in London, the home of Chelsea FC - where Millie always dreamed of playing.
Gordon said: "I don't feel comfortable asking for anything. It's not in my nature or our nature as a family. But we want to give Millie the opportunities she deserves. We just want to give her the power to dream again and to give our family some normality.
"Millie's cancer is something we will carry with us and worry about for the rest of our lives. The world is hard enough, so anything we can do to make things easier for her, we will do. We also want to raise as much awareness as possible around children's cancers because I don't believe they get anywhere near the attention or funding they deserve and desperately need."