A girl battling a brain tumour is set to have one of her ovaries frozen aged just 17 months - as her mother hopes she too can become a mum one day if she wishes.
Tallulah Cox could be left infertile due to rigorous cancer treatment - with the operation being carried out before she starts chemotherapy next month.
Tallulah will be one of the youngest in the UK to ever have had the procedure performed, just two months following her diagnosis of the incredibly rare tumour.
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The 17-month old is described as a delightfully happy toddler, and has shown her battling qualities through a whirlwind of doctors' appointments, diagnoses and an op to remove the tumour itself. But she now needs aggressive chemotherapy, which poses a risk to her ovaries.
The Mirror reports that doctors will freeze sections of one ovary so that she has the potential to start a family in later years. Her mother Zoe, 36, and dad Richard, 35, have been shaken by her plight - which began with what initially appeared to present itself as a stomach bug.
Zoe said: “We were so shocked when we were told she had a tumour. Saving her is the first thing on our minds, but we are incredibly grateful that they are also thinking about her fertility and preserving her ovary.
“To have the opportunity to still have children in her future is amazing. At 17 months old, she isn’t thinking about being a mum, but she will one day. I’ve always wanted to be a mum and I want her to have that opportunity too.”
The youngster mysteriously fell ill after a short bout with chicken pox, and started being sick after drinking. Zoe took her to the GP as a precautionary measure, who initially thought she had gastroenteritis. The mother from Whitburn, South Tyneside, said: “They sent her home but she carried on being lethargic for a week.
“Then she looked as though she couldn’t move her neck, so we took her back to hospital.”
Doctors then feared that she may have had meningitis, and prescribed antibiotics and a lumbar puncture test, but an MRI scan the next morning revealed a mass on her brain. In turn, Tallulah was sent to Newcastle's RVI, where more tests showed an ependy-moma - a tumour which develops in the fluid-filled spaces of the brain.
Zoe continued: “We were devastated. We’d never imagined that it would be anything as serious as a brain tumour. The only positive thing was that they told us it was the size of a grape, and usually when they are discovered they are the size of a plum, so it had been caught very early.”
Tallulah, who has a five-year-old brother Robert, had an operation to remove the tumour as a result the following day - and has now begun pioneering proton beam therapy treatment at the Christie Hospital in Manchester. It targets the cancer directly.
Tallulah is one of the youngest to undergo the treatment and is on a European trial. Zoe said: “They normally only give the proton beam therapy treatment to children over 18 months, but they have given it to her as she has proved she is so resilient.
“When she had the operation, they thought she would have a long recovery, but she bounced back the very next day. It was remarkable, and it’s her strength that showed the doctors that even though she was much younger, she would cope with the treatment.”
Following proton beam therapy, Tallulah will face chemo at the RVI in Newcastle - but before that happens, surgeons will remove an ovary and cut it into slices before freezing it. Cryopreservation freezes the egg-producing portion of the ovary – called the ovarian cortex. The tissue can be transplanted up to 30 years later to make pregnancy possible.
Professor Tim Child – medical director for TFP Fertility and an expert in ovary freezing – says: “It’s an exciting technique and offers a lot of hope to families. It’s still not widely performed and it tends to be in adults and girls who are post-puberty. We know it can work in the older patients. There have been cases where babies have been born after ovarian tissue has been replanted.
“Chemotherapy can damage ovaries, so the tissue is frozen and the idea is that in future it can be put back into the pelvic area to see if it can produce eggs. Much more rarely, it is done in prepubescent girls.
“But even though they are so young, the tissue can still be frozen. By the time those little ones are looking to get pregnant, the research also will have moved forward. Seventeen months is incredibly young to have this done. I haven’t heard of anyone younger than this.”
Prof Child says the difficulty in such a young patient is that the immature egg cells are extremely small. He added: “We use a laparoscopy to remove part of an ovary but before it’s frozen we examine the tissue to find the most mature of the immature eggs, using a microscope to see if there are fluid-filled sacs or follicles which contain them.
“The bit of tissue has thousands of immature eggs but we can’t see them because they are so small. What we are doing is looking for the ones which are slightly less immature. So in the future we hope to be able to transplant the ovarian tissue back to give her a chance to conceive naturally.
“But we are also storing frozen eggs which can be thawed, fertilised and transferred into her womb. So we are using two different approaches to try to preserve fertility and giving women and young girls the hope of one day having children.”
Giving Tallulah the chance to be a mother means the world to Zoe. She explained: “When we were told that the chemotherapy could make Tallulah infertile, it was the biggest thing that scared me, next to the brain tumour.
“So the fact that she’s been offered this opportunity to have her ovary frozen is brilliant. We are hopeful about the future for her.
“The tumour has been caught early and it wasn’t wrapped around anything which could have affected her walking. She’s always smiling, and she just takes everything in her stride. And the fact that she can still have the chance to be a mum means the world to us.”
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