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From: Yorkshire Post - Saturday
Date: 9/29/01
Time: 2:24:52 AM
Remote Name: 64.12.107.44
The difference a year makes for Molly-Ann...
With sparkly clips holding back her cropped, mousy hair, and maybe just a little awkward in her glittery shoes with Spice Girl heels, Molly-Ann Barnett pirouettes in the garden of her East Yorkshire home and giggles as she almost falls in the pond.
Moments later she runs to her rabbit hutch and pulls out her lop-eared pet, holding him up and announcing that this week, she has changed the dusky grey animal's name to Ginger.
As she tickles her dog's tummy and kicks her legs in the air, full of energy and smiling her famous smile, it is hard to imagine that just a year ago she was lying in a hospital bed preparing to undergo the operation that only had a one in three chance of saving her life.
On ward 10 at St James's Hospital in Leeds, Molly-Ann, of Hessle, near Hull, was a pale shadow of the girl she is today. Months of chemotherapy and the agonies of her acute myeloid leukaemia had drained the colour from her pink cheeks, turned her hair into wispy strands and taken the glamour from her smile.
Her parents, Paul, 44, and Mandy, 42, had maintained a vigil at her bedside for the previous year, launching a worldwide campaign for a suitable bone marrow donor that spread to the far corners of the globe, and eventually found an 11th hour donor in America, against odds of 90,000 to one.
It is now 12 months since Molly-Ann was transfused with that bone marrow and she looks fit as a fiddle. These exclusive new photographs will give hope to the hundreds of other parents desperately trying to save their children.
For Molly-Ann's mother, Mandy, every day is now precious – another stolen moment with the daughter whom nobody really believed would survive the awful leukaemia which racked her fragile body.
At last Mandy is daring to think further ahead than the next few hours, to plan a future for the family. She can barely stop hugging her little girl, who is largely oblivious to just how close she came to slipping away.
Yet Mandy said she had only to close her eyes to think of those dark days in the hospital, of trying to make Molly-Ann as comfortable as possible and preparing to say her goodbyes.
She said: "I simply can't sum up how our lives have changed in the year since the transplant and the two years since all this began.
"When I see Molly-Ann dancing around in the garden and playing with her friends, full of energy and rolling about with the dog, I find it so hard not to picture the same little girl lying in her hospital bed just a few months ago.
"The hard thing now is learning to treat her like a normal girl. She's back at school now, looks really fit and healthy and I have to start being the mum of a seven-year-old girl, not a seven-year-old girl with leukaemia." Mandy Barnett finds it hard to admit that it was she and husband Paul who saved their daughter's life. But there is little doubt in the minds of their supporters that it was Molly-Ann's mum and dad, and their refusal to give in which secured her future.
Yet Molly-Ann's fight is still far from over. It will be five more years before doctors can give her the all-clear.
Full of mischief and fun, she giggles as she poses for the camera and shouts "smelly socks" to make herself smile, revealing that she wants to run an ice-cream van when she's a big girl.
"At first I just wanted to run a sweet shop," she grins, "but then I thought it would be nice to see new places while I was eating the sweets."
dave.mark@ypn.co.uk