FRIGHTENING REAL LIFE
Hayley Barnes, 33, from Carlisle, never thought her little boy would see his second birthday…
Cuddling up on the sofa, Ipressed play on the remote. And on came
Teletubbies –my son Jaxon, then 11 months old, was obsessed with it.
His sister Jessica, then six, snuggled up to watch it, too.
Giggling at the screen, he pointed at Po and the gang.
But he didn’t have a favourite character. Instead, he was fascinated with something else.
‘You only like them because of their screens,’ I giggled.
Jaxon loved screens –he preferred an iPad to plushies.
Checking my phone after he’d played on it, he’d snapped aselfie and uploaded it to my social media.
He always made me and my husband Andy, 30, laugh.
Even when Jaxon fell ill with croup in August 2022, he was still a bubbly boy.
He’d been ill for two weeks beforehand with ahorsey cough. But the doctors gave him liquid steroids to treat it.
Jessica had croup as ababy, so I wasn’t too worried.
‘I’ll take him to the doctors if it gets worse,’ I told Andy.
Only, lifting Jaxon up one day, I felt something strange.
The right side of his tummy was rock hard, but it looked completely normal. How strange, I thought. Taking to Google, Ifound that it could be colic, or bloating after being breastfed. So it didn’t worry me.
Getting Andy to feel it, we agreed to keep an eye on it.
But because Jaxon wasn’t kicking up afuss, we assumed it would go down with time.
Only, on 4August 2022, I woke up at 4am to Jaxon coughing violently.
Rushing into his nursery, I picked him up, only to feel his rock-hard tummy again.
‘I’m taking Jaxon to A&E,’ I told Andy.
‘I’ll stay behind with Jessica,’ Andy agreed.
Rushing Jaxon to Cumberland Infirmary, around 10 minutes away, I expected the doctors to give him more steroids.
But Jaxon’s hard tummy was playing on my mind, so I mentioned it to the doctors.
As soon as they felt Jaxon’s tummy, we were transferred to the paediatric ward.
Maybe this is something more serious, I thought.
Jaxon was sent for blood tests and an ultrasound before we got his results.
‘There is amass on your son’s tummy,’ the doctor said. ‘We need to do more tests.’ My blood went cold. Amass, I thought. That’s not agood thing.
Ringing Andy, who’d taken Jessica to my mum Janet’s house, he rushed over instantly.
And at 5pm that evening, we were called into aseparate room.
‘We’re pretty sure it’s hepatoblastoma,’ the doctor told us slowly. ‘It’s liver cancer.’
Jaxon was asleep in his hospital cot, o
