With the joy of welcoming a baby into the world comes a dose of fear of whether everything would be okay with the bundle of joy.
When 21-year-old Paige Franks gave birth to her baby daughter Mila, she noticed how the girl had a strange lump on the back of her neck. This made the young mother worried sick. No matter how much she wanted to believe it wasn’t anything serious, the thought that the lump could be cancer obsessed her.
“I thought she had cancer. You see a lump and you just assume. I was in bits and in tears. For the first few weeks I thought she was going to die. It was really scary.”
So, the first thing Paige did was bring sweet Mila for a check up. The relief came when doctors told her there was nothing she should be worried about. It turned out the lump, that already grew to the size of a tennis ball, was a birthmark.
This surprised Paige who has never heard of or seen such a birthmark before.
According to the doctors, Mila had a congenital hemangioma which is a result of tangled blood vessels that grow under the baby’s skin.
Paige, however, wanted to make sure everything was going to be just fine, so she would measure the lump and would always be extra cautious when Mila was around people. She feared those who wanted to touch her and carry her could touch the lump and even rupture it by mistake so before going out, Paige always wrapped the lump in cotton wool.
“It was like another head. One of my friends joked that it could have been a twin but obviously it wasn’t,” Paige said in an interview.
Over the next couple of months, the lump started to shrink. Eventually, it disappeared completely.
We are very glad everything turned for the best for Mila and her mom at the end.
