A 29-year-old mom with terminal cancer is trying to make memories with her four children after her breast cancer spread — when, just five years ago, she was told she wasn’t old enough for the disease.
Ashleigh Ellerton first sought medical care for pain in her right breast in 2020. Since she didn’t have a family history of the disease — and was only 24 at the time — she was told she was “too young,” for cancer, Ellerton told The Daily Mail.
Once a lump appeared, she returned to the doctor, where, she said, “I refused to leave until they’d sent me to the breast clinic.” Tests determined that she had inflammatory breast cancer. As the American Cancer Society explains, it’s a rare, aggressive, and invasive type of illness in which the breast looks inflamed from cancer cells blocking lymph vessels in the skin.
She underwent chemotherapy and radiation — as well as a mastectomy — and in December of that year, Ellerton, from the English town of Bridlington, was told she had no evidence of disease. But the mom whose kids range in in age from 5 to 11, says she was concerned, telling the outlet, “I was convinced that the cancer was not finished with me.”
She married her partner Simon in 2021, but says “I told my nurses who had come to my wedding that my cancer was going to come back in my liver.”
A year later, she contracted sepsis — a life-threatening condition where the immune system responds improperly to infection — and while undergoing surgery to remove her damaged gallbladder, doctors saw that Ellerton was right: The cancer had metastasized to her liver.
“It was a shock but I’d read stories and I’d seen people live a lot longer,” said Ellerton of the 2022 diagnosis. “I didn’t think I would die in three years, there is no chance.” But Ellerton began to develop migraines — a symptom of the cancer’s spread to her brain and spinal cord.
And last fall, she says she was told, “I had three months to live. I then had to go home to tell my children, I remember them screaming. My five-year-old didn’t understand what was going on, but I remember him crying and saying he wasn’t going to see me.”
“My daughter did ask if Santa could take away my cancer,” Ellerton says. Although she made it to Christmas — her “biggest goal” — she’s looking to make more memories with her children with the help of a GoFundMe set up by her mother, who calls Ellerton her children’s “rock, their provider, their comfort blanket, their one and only mummy.”
“I would want them to remember I was present,” said Ellerton, “and that I fought as hard as I could.”
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