Sydney schoolgirl Ruby King is one of just 60 children in the world to be struck with the deadly disease. Phillip Koch meets a special little girl who fought to beat the odds.
When little Ruby King danced in her primary school concert in November, it marked the end of a terrifying seven-month ordeal for her and her family.
For the best part of a year, eight-year-old Ruby’s symptoms had doctors bewildered. Finally, in October last year, she was found to have lung cancer – becoming one of only a handful of children in the world ever diagnosed with the disease.
“It was horrifying,” says her mum Rebecca, from Sydney’s Sutherland Shire. “Ruby started to get sick in March last year but because she was wheezing a lot we thought she had asthma. Then she had a cough that didn’t go away.”
Over the next seven months, Ruby’s mum and dad, Adrian, consulted doctor after doctor to try to discover what was wrong with their little girl, but the medics were puzzled.
“When we were down in Victoria on a family bike ride, Ruby got really sick and started to complain that her chest was hurting – and it just didn’t seem to get better,” says Rebecca.
The family came home, and soon after, Ruby, then seven, started losing a lot of weight and began coughing up blood.
Now Rebecca and Adrian knew their daughter was suffering from something far more serious than asthma.
Ruby was admitted to Sydney Children’s Hospital, Randwick, for what doctors thought was pneumonia.
A scan showed a blockage to her lungs, but even after exploratory surgery uncovered a large mass, doctors thought it was unlikely to be sinister. Lung cancer was almost unheard of in a child Ruby’s age.
But pathology tests proved the growth was a malignant tumour. The Year Three schoolgirl had a form of cancer which usually only affects adults…
Read the full story in this week’s Woman’s Day, on sale June 22, 2009.
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