Three-year-old Kate battling with cancer

ON December 8, 2009, three-year-old Kate Naughton from Kilrush was diagnosed with clear cell sarcoma (cancer) of the kidney. Since then, Kate has had her kidney removed and has undergone intensive chemotherapy treatment.

Her mother, Charmaine Naughton, and father, Jason Kelly, have had to try and explain to their daughter what has happened to her but that hasn’t been straightforward, as some side effects have already taken root.
“She knows there’s something up,” Charmaine told The Clare Champion. “She looks in the mirror sometimes and says ‘Mammy, look my hair isn’t blond any more. I’m not pretty anymore’.
“She’s only three. She doesn’t understand why this is happening to her. She used to go to the crèche but now she’s confined to home. She can’t play with anyone because she’s prone to infection. It’s like she’s had a life but now her life is on pause.”
Charmaine said aspects of the chemotherapy have proven very severe.
“At the moment, they have stopped one of her chemo treatments because it’s starting to affect her walk. The muscles in her legs are starting to tighten up. She has also lost her hair and she has a droopy eye. It goes away but some of them can be permanent,” she explained.
These days, Kate can’t even play with her friends without worrying about picking up a cold, as her immune system has been weakened.
“Kids are standing at her gate talking into her because they think they are going to catch what she has. They’re only children, they don’t know what she has. She says to them ‘you can’t come in if you have a cold’. At three years of age, she knows she can catch a cold off someone.
“She goes from a high to a low in the space of five seconds sometimes because of the side effects. If a child is allowed in to play with her, she’ll play with them but the least little thing they do, she gets mad with them. But it’s not because she means it but the other kids don’t understand that either,” Charmaine said.
It will take at least five years for Kate to be given the all-clear. Charmaine remembers getting the phone call from the crèche late last year, informing her that Kate had a pain in her stomach.
“She got sent home sick and when I got home from work that evening, she needed to go to the doctor. I went to rub her belly and she had a big lump on her side. The doctor didn’t know if it was a Wilms’ tumour or if her spleen was enlarged. They also thought it might have been constipation because she was constipated for a week beforehand,” she recalled.
“We went to Limerick and within two days, they had diagnosed her with cancer but they didn’t know what cancer. They said the only place that could treat her was Crumlin hospital and she was diagnosed the day after with clear cell sarcoma,” Charmaine added.
Although she had known for a few days that Kate had some discomfort, Charmaine didn’t think that it was anything serious.
“She was a normal, perfectly healthy child. She was constipated because she doesn’t eat fruit and things like that. She was constipated for normal reasons, as I thought.
“But it turned out that she couldn’t go to the toilet because the tumour was so big and this went on for the two days that she was in Limerick.
“It got really, really big but within those two days, it stopped growing. It just stayed at that size. She wasn’t drinking or eating and she couldn’t lie down or sit down. She was in an awful lot of pain,” she noted.
Her daughter was kept in Crumlin for three weeks following her diagnosis and has to return again next week.
“We’ve to go back up next week and they’ll do an abdominal scan on her because they haven’t checked her yet to see if everything is gone since she had the kidney removed. That could determine anything but we’re hoping that there’s nothing left there. Because it’s a clear cell cancer, they don’t know it’s there until it actually starts growing,” Charmaine said.
While beset by worry, Charmaine and Jason, who also have a nine-month-old son, Jake, have been stunned by local people’s support of a number of recent fundraisers in Garrihy’s, Moyasta and a youth club disco in Kilrush Youth Centre.
“The town really came together with their support,” Charmaine acknowledged, adding that the cost of travel and additional expenses are a concern.
She expects that the chemotherapy will be completed by Christmas but Charmaine has been told by the doctor treating Kate that they will be travelling up and down to Dublin for years yet.
“We’ll be up to him every month until he’s grey and old, as he said. But fingers crossed he said that nothing comes back,” Kate’s mother concluded on a hopeful note.