Ariel Leve may be living in fear thanks to internet self-diagnosis (One Google search and I was a goner, July 26), but my three-year-old daughter has Google to thank for her eyesight and the absence of severe facial disfigurement. I would never condone people second-guessing their GPs with Googled symptoms, but when the NHS has let you down badly, the net can be a godsend and can work extremely well as a last resort.
My daughter was born with a pale pink patch over her eye and on her forehead. We were told that it was "a pressure mark from a rough birth". Three weeks later, the pale pink mark had become a livid, blood-red growth covering and closing her right eye and extending to her hairline. Two health visitors, five GPs and four midwives told us that it was nothing to worry about. Yet it was growing like some alien. Daily, my partner and I watched it exploding across the face of our beautiful baby. I kept asking him, "It's not just me, is it? It's grown since you went to work."
By her six-week check, her right eye was firmly closed. During the check, I expressed no worries about weight gain, feeding or sleeping. All I asked about, repeatedly, was what was happening to her eye. My concerns were ignored, but to keep me quiet, I was offered a non-urgent appointment to a dermatologist at our local hospital. I knew by this time that this was no mere skin complaint. In our "Red Book", under the section "parental concerns", the recorded remark is "None".
When the fifth GP, a week later, diagnosed the problem as an eye infection, I was desperate. I went online, and Googled "birthmark". Within minutes, I had found photographs of exactly the same condition and a support-group website. I was crying with relief when I emailed the Birthmark Support Group with Matilda's symptoms. Within two hours I received a call from a parent who helps to run the group, who promised to do whatever he could.
Somehow, within 24 hours, bypassing the NHS bureaucracy that we had come to believe was the only route to treatment, he had arranged for the birthmark unit at Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital to call us. They urged us to get there as soon as we could. We raced there. Nine gruelling hours later, we had a diagnosis and treatment had begun on a rare and potentially blinding and disfiguring condition called a cavernous haemangioma.
Without prompt treatment, we were told, Matilda might have gone blind. She would certainly have suffered long-lasting facial disfigurement. The consultant was thrilled to have been able to treat a haemangioma at an early stage of its development, as his working life is spent mopping up the mess left by it being missed or misdiagnosed. He told us he sees scores of children every year whose prospects have been drastically reduced by poor diagnosis and referral.
After months of steroid treatment and lots of patching, Matilda's eyesight was saved and, although the haemangioma remains on her forehead, it is fading. With luck, it won't even be a talking point by the time she hits adolescence.
Looking back, I feel I was dismissed as a "neurotic new mother" and made to feel I was a fussy time-waster. The Birthmark Support Group not only arranged Matilda's hospital appointment, they then gave me and my partner endless support throughout the treatment.
Matilda was lucky. Some very similar conditions are seriously life-threatening, but most GPs will only happen on them once or twice in the whole of their practising career. I'm not a GP, but I took the time - all of five minutes on the internet - to find out what was wrong with my daughter.
