The 2 weeks running up the diagnosis

14/09. Victoria has what appears to be a heavy cold. Runny nose, aches and pains, hot and cold flushes. I gave her painkillers, lots of fluids, made her rest, and she still felt able to go to school.

The next 48 hours she didn't really improve, and she looked a little paler than normal, but as a fair skinned child anyway this wasn't out of the ordinary.

16/09. Victoria gets up and ready for school as normal, but I could see that she's not herself at all. When I asked her if she was OK, the response was a flood of tears. After some cuddles and TLC, and without speaking, she turned around, lifted up her school shirt and showed me a lump on her back at the base of her left shoulder blade. I was rather taken aback by what I saw. She had a lump that looked like she had a tennis ball under her skin, and it was black and angry. Through the tears she told me it was very painful.

Naturally I took her straight to the Doctors, and the nurse told us it was a boil that had become infected, and that a course of antibiotics would see to it, along with a dressing designed to bring out the yukky stuff. The flu-like symptoms were explained by the infection clearly present in the boil.

Victoria missed the rest of the week from school, and the boil started to improve, but strangely she didn't. She was getting lethargic and remained pale. However, come Monday, she said she felt well enough to go to school, so off she went.

At school, a couple of her teachers remarked on her pale complexion. Sarah took her aside to ask if she was OK, to which Victoria said she was fine. To say she looked pale was a bit of an understatement, she looked like a ghost.

Now things got worse, as Victoria started to get out of breath very easily, after walking 20 or 30 yards, and this was being accompanied by splitting headaches. Victoria, being one of life's 'copers' just put this down to the antibiotics and soldiered on, and being a typical teenager, she didn't tell me this was happening. She has such a non-complaining nature, every time I asked after her health she always said that she was OK.

However one thing she did tell me was that she had 2 bruises that didn't seem to be getting any better. One of these was on her hip, and was received a week and a half earlier at a friends sleep over where she'd got the bruise in a pillow fight. Looking a the size of the bruise I wondered what must have been in the pillow to cause such a bruise. She said it didn't hurt, she was just worried because it appeared to be spreading.

She also had a bruise on her knee that had been caused in a typical sibling fight when her brother had hit her with a stick. Of course he protested that he hadn't hit her that hard, and of course, for once, he was telling the truth!

These bruises defied explanation. There were lasting longer, and were bigger than they should've been, and whilst they were not hurting her, clearly this wasn't right.

As with a lot of things, I looked at the factors around, the ones I understood, and it was a case of, this is all the boil/antibiotics. Good job I'm not a doctor then!