Three months ago little Annabelle Potts was diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer and her parents were told she might only have nine months to live.
The three-year-old has Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma (DIPG), a highly aggressive and difficult to treat tumour, found at the base of the brain.
Six months before Annabelle’s diagnosis, she began to show symptoms that made her parents, Kathie and Adam, think something wasn’t quite right. It started with sleep disturbances, dizziness, and slurred speech, before progressing to behavioural changes, vomiting and a limp.
Kathie and Adam repeatedly took Annabelle to their GP over this period, but because the tumour was hard to detect, it took months for her to be properly diagnosed.
When her parents presented Annabelle at the emergency room on Boxing Day she finally had an MRI, and they were told she had a rare form of cancer that the hospital staff had never seen before.
Annabelle was rushed to Sydney Children's Hospital, where she began an intense round of radiotherapy.
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As chemotherapy can't treat this form of cancer, and Annabelle is so young, she had to have a general anesthetic five days a week for six weeks in order to receive the radiation therapy.
"I just told her she had something growing in her head and she needed to have the magical radiation to help it shrink," explained Kathie.
In mid-February Annabelle completed the treatment. Kathie and Adam took her home to Canberra, with no guarantee of how long she would live.
