Even months after she lost her long brown hair to “hard and heavy” chemotherapy treatment, Hayley Brown’s eyelashes remained.
“Right through people, including her older sister, always said how jealous they were of her beautiful big eyelashes,” her father Andrew told Kidspot.
“But then one day she was complaining about something in her eye. The lashes were all coming out one at a time.”
Hayley Brown. Source: Facebook
The seven-year-old has been battling cancer since the middle of the year and was initially upset when she was told she'd lose her hair.
As it happened, though, she hardly seemed to notice, Her eyelashes disappeared more slowly, dropping out one-by-one.
On Sunday, Andrew, who founded the Comedy Gallery in North Melbourne, shared a beautiful picture on Facebook of his young daughter's final lash.
"She doesn’t really realise they’re gone, people stopped talking about them. She probably doesn’t even know her eyebrows are practically gone," he said.
Hayley was taken to hospital when one of her eyes began pointing in the wrong direction in June.
A scan revealed a cancerous lump in her nose, which would require eight months of intensive chemotherapy.
Hayley has lost wight since being sick. Source: Facebook
Because of the location of the tumour, a lot of the time the primary school student is forced to eat through a tube in her stomach, which means her weight and energy levels have both dropped terribly.
She was only 19kg when she began and has now lost a further 2kg.
"She has weakness in her legs, at the moment I am carrying her around everywhere," Andrew said.
"The hardest thing is seeing her now after being so full of life. I have a video from the start of the year, filming her older sister at a playground on a flying fox."
Hayley and her dad, Andrew. Source: Facebook
Hayley still has five and a half weeks of radiation and two more rounds of chemotherapy to go, but her three month scan revealed her tumour was already shrinking.
Sadly her 21-year-old cousin was also diagnosed with a form of lymphoma within four weeks.
Because of his job, Andrew has spent years organising benefits for cancer sufferers and is behind a comedy night for the pair to be held in Ballarat on Friday, December 16. You can also support the family through My Cause.