After seeing her daughter to recovery, Vanessia was determined to make it through her own cancer.
\n\nWhen Vanessia Woo told her youngest child, Olivia, that she had stage three breast cancer, Olivia did not react much.
\n\nShe was only five then, and maybe did not understand the severity of her mother's illness.
\n\nBut it was also somewhat of a role reversal for mother and daughter.
\n\nOlivia was just five weeks old when Vanessia and her husband learnt their tiny baby had leukaemia.
\n\nThey had brought her to a hospital for a fever, Vanessia remembers. Just to get it checked out.
\n\nBut two blood tests later, the doctors confirmed that about 90 per cent of the cells in her bone marrow were leukaemia cells.
\n\n"That broke us," Vanessia said. "We didn't know how to react."
\n\nShe tried to be strong for her child. For the first few months of her life in 2018, Olivia underwent various tests, surgeries, and chemotherapy.
\n\nTo check whether she was responding well to treatment, doctors had to do a lumbar puncture every few weeks. This involved inserting a very long needle into her lower back to draw samples of fluid surrounding her spinal cord.
\n\nAs Olivia…
Original source: https://mothership.sg/
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