Leeds couple's five years of IVF before newborn baby diagnosed with cancer

Little Maddison Holt, from Gipton, was diagnosed with a Myofibroblastic Tumour just months after she was born in August 2019.

It was a huge blow for parents Rob, 31 and Natasha, 30, who had been overjoyed when they found out that they had fallen pregnant with their first child after five-years of trying to conceive.

Rob, a key cutter at Timpson, said: "Maddison is our first child and was a long time in the making.

"The IVF was a gruelling process and we must've gone through ten pregnancy tests a day but we were beyond happy when we got pregnant.

"Maddison was an unbelievable miracle."

One month after her birth Rob and Natasha, who have been together for eight years, got married in front of all their family.

The father-of-one said: "It was amazing to have Maddison there - though no one cared about us, she stole the show in her little gorgeous white dress."

However, the new parents' joy was short-lived when, just one month later, grandma Mandy noticed a hard lump in the youngster's stomach as she was soothing her.

The family rushed her straight to Leeds General Infirmary where they spent eight difficult weeks waiting for a diagnosis.

In November, they were told that Maddison, then three-months old, had a rare cancer called Inflammatory Myofibroblastic Tumour.

Natasha, who also works at Timpson, said: "I just don’t think we expected it. We 'd only just had a baby so emotions were already all over the place.

"We’d struggled for so long to get pregnant, we’d gone through the IVF and finally got her and then to be told told she had cancer - it was hard.

"When you hear that word your first thought is 'is she going to die?' We didn’t know how to feel or what was going to happen."

It was a particularly difficult time for Rob, who had seen several family members lose their lives to cancer.

He added: "The cancer diagnosis was the worst thing I could have heard.

"There’s been a lot of cancer in my family and my first reaction was to fear the worst because I’d never known someone beat it.

“During the time we were on the cancer ward I even had to go to my auntie's funeral, who had died from cancer, and then head straight back to the ward.

"I felt broken, raw and lost. Whenever I left the hospital I would cry for hours on end."

Maddison began a treatment of chemotherapy to try and shrink the tumour down in size and in late November, she was allowed to be taken home and return to the hospital for treatment.