12:08 AM
Anonymous
Among the dozens of photos that proud parents Curtis and Leonie Norville were taking of their newborn son, one in particular stood out.
The striking image showed nine-week-old Romero lying on a play mat with a ghostly white reflection in his left eye.
Alarm bells immediately started ringing for Mr Norville, a professional photographer and cameraman who had never seen anything like it before.
After a trip to the GP, Romero was swiftly referred to a local children’s hospital where a consultant delivered the devastating news that a rare eye cancer had caused a large tumour behind the eye – and five smaller ones behind his right eye.
Four months on, Romero is responding to chemotherapy and laser treatment.
But his parents have decided to speak out about his case to warn other parents about the condition.
‘When we were told he had tumours it was heartbreaking and Leonie was hysterical.
'She was crying her eyes out,’ said Mr Norville, who is in his 30s and from Perry Barr in Birmingham.
‘We’d never heard of this condition before. No one in our family had had it. Our world fell apart.
‘But he is responding well to treatment. Romero has been very good and the only problem is he wakes up a lot at night because chemotherapy makes babies feed little and often.’
Mrs Norville, an adult social services manager, added: ‘At first when we heard the news I would cry every day – away from Romero so he wouldn’t pick up on our unhappiness.
Now we take it one day at a time.’
The couple first spotted something was wrong at the end of May.
‘Romero is our first child so we were taking lots of photos with a camera phone,’ said Mr Norville.
‘Sometimes you get red eye in the photos but this looked almost like a hole in his eye.
‘We went to the GP who said the eye wasn’t reflecting light and referred us to Birmingham Children’s Hospital.’
Within days, tests revealed the mass of tumours behind his eyes.
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