WHEN little Marley Shaw started to limp, her parents thought she might have damaged her knee.
The family took their two-year-old daughter to hospital where medics conducted blood tests.
To their horror, doctors told the family that their little girl’s sore leg had actually been down to leukaemia.
Leukaemia is a type of blood cancer that affects cells in bone marrow and attacks the immune system.
In most cases of leukaemia, there is no obvious cause.
It is a cancer that leads to the body making too many abnormal white blood cells and means the body is less likely to be able to defend itself against infection.
Marley, who lives in Uttoxeter with parents Callum Shaw and Charley Straughton is now undergoing treatment for cancer.
The family were given the news just before Christmas, with Marley starting her treatment at Royal Derby Hospital on December 23.
She has since been transferred and is currently receiving treatment at the Queen’s Medical Centre, in Nottingham.
Dad Callum, 23, who works as a salt miner, said the only reason they had taken their little girl to hospital was because she had been limping.
Speaking to Stoke-on-Trent Live he said: “My partner Charley was with Marley at the Royal Derby Hospital because you’re only allowed one person in with her at a time, and I was watching my rugby team play when I got a phone call saying the doctor wanted to see both of us together.
“You hear that and you know straight away that it’s not going to be good news. So we just had to prepare ourselves for it and try to think positively.
“But that drive to the hospital felt the longest drive I have ever had to make in my life; it was horrible.”
Marley will need bone-marrow tests and lumbar punctures and the family have said she’s ‘taking it all in her stride’.
They said that she has even taken to ‘bossing the nurses around’ but continues to be a ‘little star’.
