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We’ve heard of smartphones saving lives before. From live-saving emergency calls to medical apps diagnosing symptoms, but we rarely hear of the camera on our iPhones saving lives – which is exactly what happened to two-year-old, Avery Fitzgerald.
Avery’s mother, Julie, had been noticing something strange about her son’s eye for a few months. When viewed under direct light, Avery’s eye looked strange, and Julie instantly felt something was wrong.
Ignoring her husband, who dismissed it, Julie began researching what it could be on the internet.
Whilst self-diagnosing on the internet can be dangerous, in this case, it was the opposite.
Julie stumbled across an article on a forum which said that if your eye photographs with a white pupil, you could have cancer.
With dread and apprehension, Julie took a photo of Avery with the flash on.
And sure enough, there it was – a completely white pupil.
Julie’s photo of Avery.
“I did not want to take the picture because I had this dreaded feeling in the pit of my stomach,” said Julie, “I took the picture, and boom, his whole pupil was just white — and that’s when I knew.”
Julie immediately rushed Avery to a hospital, where an eye doctor diagnosed him with retinoblastoma – a rare cancer of the eye. 75 per cent of the two-year-old’s eye was covered in tumours.
Avery’s affected eye has since been completely removed, but he’s not out of the woods yet. He still has to undergo genetic marking to determine whether or not the cancer will return, and then be fitted for a prosthetic eye.
Avery’s father, Patrick, however, has some advice for anyone who dismissed their partner’s worries, like he did.
“Trust a mumma’s gut … and don’t wait,” he said, “Don’t wait to see if it improves.”
