When a mum was told by her daughter that she should get her puffy eyes checked out, she worried she would be wasting the doctor's time for a 'cosmetic problem'. Lizzie Spear, a 56-year-old from near Uttoxeter in Staffordshire, thought her swollen eyes were just a result of tiredness, and nothing more serious.
"My daughter Lowri had said, 'Mum, I think you need to go and see the GP because you don't look very well'," recalls Lizzie. "The bags under my eyes were ridiculously large, which I put down to tiredness as I wasn’t sleeping well. I actually told Lowri that I wasn't going to waste the doctor's time with a cosmetic issue, but she convinced me to go.".
In February 2021, Lizzie reluctantly went for an appointment where she underwent routine blood tests. She was shocked when the results came back a day later flagging up an abnormality and told to go urgently to hospital for a bone marrow biopsy. Lizzie was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL). There are fewer than 800 new cases in the UK annually, and it's more common in children than adults.
One of the symptoms of ALL is extreme tiredness, which doctors think possibly explained the puffy bags under her eyes. Lizzie spent eight weeks undergoing treatment at Nottingham City Hospital, where she was given an intense course of chemotherapy, which required drugs to be injected directly into the fluid around her spinal cord.
