A mother revealed on social media how she detected her little one’s rare eye cancer.
Steph from Canada took a flash photo of her 16-month-old daughter, Summer Raine, in 2021 when she caught something strange.
While one eye appeared red from the flash, the other had a cloudy white glow. “I knew something was wrong,” Steph said in a recent TikTok video.
Steph took her little one to the local emergency room in Toronto, where doctors found retinoblastoma, a rare eye cancer that grows in the back of the eye due to a genetic mutation.
Steph, a mother in Canada, posted on TikTok that she noticed a white glow in the left pupil of her daughter, Summer Raine. It turned out to be retinoblastoma, an eye cancer.
Summer underwent three months of chemotherapy, although she did not respond to the treatment. She had to have her left eye removed and she is now cancer free.
Although rare, retinoblastoma is the most common eye cancer in children, with around 200 to 300 patients diagnosed per year, most of whom are under the age of two.
Three out of four patients, like Summer, have retinoblastoma in only one eye.
Summer immediately began three months of chemotherapy, although her tumor did not respond to the treatment.
To prevent the cancer from spreading, doctors decided to remove his left eye.
This eliminated all evidence of the disease and she is still cancer-free three years later.
Even though retinoblastoma is so rare, it generally has a good prognosis, with a 96 percent survival rate.
Symptoms include a white pupil, cloudy eyes, misaligned eyes that look toward the ears or nose, different colored irises, and a red, swollen eyeball.
Steph is now focused on raising awareness of retinoblastoma among other parents.
“Remember that retinoblastoma is rare, but be sure to check your baby’s eyes with a flash,” Steph wrote in the caption of one of her videos.
“Retinas should not be white.”
