With love in the air on the eve of Valentines’ Day two years ago, mum Sally Filtness could not have been happier as she watched over the beautiful identical twin girls she and husband Tim conceived with the help of IVF.
But her joy quickly turned to terror the following day when her longed-for daughter Chloe – an identical twin to sister Zara – was diagnosed with cancer when she was rushed to emergency, after Tim found blood in her nappy.
“They said, ‘It’s nephroblastoma, it’s cancerous and it’s taken over the whole of her left kidney,'” Sydney-based teacher Sally, 45, tells Woman’s Day, adding that doctors warned her the cancer was spreading fast throughout her two-year-old’s body.
“It took so long to get these little girls and now I faced the prospect of losing one of them.”
The family were told Chloe had a stage five Wilms’ tumour, which is the most common type of kidney cancer in children.
“The quote to us was, ‘It’s bad but it’s treatable,'” says Sally. “If they’d left it any longer it would have been riddled through her little body.”
“She was pretty adult about it,” says Sally about Chloe’s illness.
(Image: Supplied)Taking Zara to stay with family, a devastated Sally and husband Tim, 43, spent the next six weeks by Chloe’s side in hospital as she underwent gruelling chemotherapy, which continued for six months.
The brave youngster also needed a month of radiation treatment and surgery to remove her left kidney, but kept smiling throughout.
“It was a blessing Chloe was so young,” says Sally.
The twins with dad Tim and mum Sally.
(Image: Supplied)Thankfully, Chloe’s cancer responded to treatment, with the tumour halving within three months. And in September 2017, Chloe was given the all-clear. While she’ll need monitoring, she is now a bright and bubbly five-year-old, who is a face of the 2019 Jeans for Genes campaign.
“Research is important because it’s kept Chloe alive,” says Sally. “I thank God every day that we were able to save her.”
Jeans for Genes Day is on Friday, August 2. Visit their website here for more details.
