Awwww! Mother tells amazing lie to save daughter from cancer

One fateful morning, a woman walked into the Accidents and Emergencies unit of a hospital and told the doctors her three year old daughter had fallen and hit her head and vomited.

It was a lie, but it saved her daughter’s life.

Amanda Davies, 40, is not a serial liar. But she did lie to try to get the brain scan she felt her daughter, Lilwen, urgently needed at the time.

“It was totally out of character for me, but I felt I had no other option,” she told DailyMail.

In retrospect however, she’s grateful to have pushed through her reservations about lying to the doctors who believed her story, ran a scan on Lilwen, and found a tumour the size of a lemon growing in her brain.

Before then Lil had seen four different doctors who repeatedly told her mother there was no need to worry.

Amanda and her husband, Aled, became concerned about their daughter when, as she approached her third birthday, she couldn’t walk upstairs as normal.

A few months later, they noticed she was wobbly on her feet.

Amanda took Lil to a General Practitioner (GP), a medical doctor, in April 2014 but she couldn’t be attended to because she had a chest infection and Amanda was told to bring her back when she was better.

They returned a month later to meet a different GP who didn’t offer a possible diagnosis but said a letter would be sent asking for a referral to a consultant paediatrician.

As they waited for the appointment letter, Lil’s condition worsened. She became withdrawn, and complained about pain in her head. Meanwhile, her problems with walking persisted.

In June, they returned to the GP who said they were still waiting for a referral and that there was no need to speed things along.

One month after, Amanda and Aled paid privately to see a consultant paediatrician who told them Lil simply had hypermobile joints, meaning that her joints flexed more than normal and she would need physiotherapy.

As much as she wanted the problem to be something that simple, Amanda didn’t think it explained the headaches. She googled the symptoms and learnt that they could imply the presence of a brain tumour. And she convinced herself not to believe it.

By August 2014, however, she could ignore the symptoms no longer. Hence she took Lil to the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff with a fabricated story about a brain injury.

Four days after the diagnosis, Lil underwent a ten-hour surgery to remove the tumour. She was discharged a month later.

To ensure all of the cancerous tissue was gone, Lil also had to have proton beam therapy – a targeted form of radiotherapy thought to be less damaging to the surrounding tissue.

The family had to go to the U. S. to have 30 sessions of that over six weeks. The treatment was completed just before Christmas.

Lil has been improving since then although there is a 30 to 50 per cent chance that the cancer will return. Hence, she has scans every three weeks.

Although the family continues to live on tenterhooks, Amanda is grateful she told that lie.

“If I had not gone to A&E that day and effectively lied, I think Lil would be dead or her cancer would have been inoperable,” Amanda said.

“I’m so glad I did what I did. I just wish I had done something sooner.”.