A dying four-year-old girl in agony caused by cancer. So Painful
It was shared by the girl’s father Andy Whelan on Facebook after he took the photo this week. 4 year old Jessica has terminal cancer and has just weeks to live.
Within 24 hours, Jessica’s photo had reached half a million people. The outpouring of empathy was overwhelming. An anguished howl of sorrow reverberated round the world.
‘This is the true face of the disease: my little girl’s blood vessels visible under her skin, a solitary tear running down her cheek, her body stiff and her face contorted with pain.
‘It was taken at the moment when we, her parents, could offer her no comfort, during a flare-up of pain before her fast-acting morphine had taken effect, Jessica pushing us away as she rode out her searing pain in solitude.’
Andy took the painful photo last Saturday only days after he and Nicki had learned that their only daughter — who had been fighting cancer for 13 months — had only weeks left to live.
A month earlier, they had made the decision that Jessica had suffered enough; that as she could never be cured of the awful disease that was ravaging her small body, she should endure no more treatment to prolong her life.
The endless hospital visits, the cannulas administering strong drugs, the fresh agony to her tiny pain-racked frame — all of it should end and she should come home to Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire, for palliative care and to die in her little bed next to her parents’ bigger one, surrounded by her teddies and the family who adored her.
‘Death from cancer is not a quiet slipping away,’ says Andy. ‘It is hell. And there was part of me, too, that knew I would need to look back on a photo of Jessica as she suffered excruciating pain so I would be able to say: “We made the right decision in not prolonging her treatment.”
‘Of course we want to hold onto her for ever. We cannot bear the thought of losing her. But seeing her suffer is agony, too, and we cannot wish on her a life of pain just so she can stay with us longer.
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