Former “My Kitchen Rules” contestants Carly Saunders and Tresne Middleton have shared the warning signs of the deadly disease that killed their infant daughter.
The couple, who appeared on the fifth season of the Australian show, welcomed “little miracle” Poppy Grace in June 2021, after an eight-year IVF journey.
Just weeks after bringing her home, however, they realized something was wrong – Poppy’s “belly was starting to get enlarged … and when she was feeding, she would have quite large vomits”, Middleton told 7Life.
She also had a bruise on her thigh that didn’t fade for more than a month.
Before Poppy was even three months old, Saunders and Middleton were delivered devastating news by her doctor: she had infantile acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a cancer of the blood and bone marrow.
“It’s something that you always hear that happens to somebody, but you never think it’s going to happen to you,” Saunders said.
“We didn’t even really believe it at first because it’d been such a long journey to even have Poppy.
“We’d been trying since 2012 to have a baby and then she was our little miracle. Then for that to happen … We thought we were going to lose her that night. Every day was a battle.”
Saunders added that in retrospect, she and Middleton couldn’t believe they hadn’t realized something was wrong.
“With leukemia, if they’re pale, if they’ve got bruises or excessive bleeding – they are generally signs that the leukemia is affecting their marrow, which therefore affects their blood,” she explained.
“Looking back, we think, how did we not notice she was so pale? But because it happened so gradually, we had no idea.
“We didn’t realize that her bones were full of leukemia and she was probably in pain. So it’s hard to think back on now.”
The couple was told that Poppy required a bone-marrow transplant – which she received, two days before her first birthday. But within 96 hours, she’d taken a turn for the worse.
“Doctors said to spend as much time with her as you can,” Middleton recalled.
By February last year – when Poppy was 20 months old – she was receiving a quarter of the amount of pain relief of an adult dose, despite being one-tenth in size.
“It still wasn’t doing the trick,” Middleton said, “and it was quite traumatic to try and keep her out of pain in the end.”
Their daughter died in the early hours of February 16 – with Middleton and Saunders unable to touch or hold her during her final moments, because she was being kept comfortable as “leukemia took over her body”.
The pair are now encouraging people to donate blood – something of which “there’s a huge shortage of” at the moment, and an act that can help save the lives of cancer patients.
“It would be an injustice to Poppy and the impact she’s had on others” not to do so, they said.
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