Clare said: “It’d just been her fourth birthday, and we had gone on holiday to Devon. <\/p>\n
“We were at a caravan park, and she was at the children’s disco one night, and another child ran into her, and she was complaining about having a headache, absolute beside herself crying.”<\/p>\n
The family took Seren to A&E where it was initially thought her symptoms were a neck condition called Torticollis.<\/p>\n
However, over the following days Seren’s symptoms worsened.<\/p>\n
A CT scan revealed she had a brain tumour in the back of her head.<\/p>\n
She was rushed by ambulance to the specialist children’s neurological ward at University Hospital Southampton (UHS) where an MRI scan showed the tumour was operable.<\/p>\n
Mark said: “She had 12 hours of brain surgery. It was deemed an amazing success. The guys were absolutely incredible.”<\/p>\n
When the tumour was confirmed to be cancerous, she was referred to University College London Hospital (UCLH) to undergo six weeks of PBT.<\/p>\n
In November 2025, Seren had her post-treatment scan and was then onto three monthly scans for at least two years.<\/p>\n
But in May 2026, they showed her tumour had grown back and spread.<\/p>\n
Mark said: “It had got pretty big pretty. And it had grown into the brainstem.<\/p>\n
“So within a three-month period, it had not only returned in the area that it had been treated, it had spread across the brain and spine.”<\/p>\n
Clare said: “When she relapsed, there were no options for a cure, and that was just really shocking. Like no medications, chemotherapy wasn’t an option.<\/p>\n
“We could have had the intracranial, but again, it would’ve just made her really poorly. It wouldn’t have cured her.”<\/p>\n
Mark added: “All this would be kind of to buy time.<\/p>\n
“And as a parent, knowing now the outcome, and your daughter doesn’t know anything about it and doesn’t look like it, it’s pretty heartbreaking.”<\/p>\n
The family spent time making memories together before Seren passed away at Julia’s House hospice in July.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Clare said: “It’d just been her fourth birthday, and we had gone on holiday to Devon. “We were…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":807503,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[59,102,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-807502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-gb","tag-health","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=807502"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807502\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/807503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=807502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=807502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=807502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}