EDDIE Pessoa de Araujo was just six years old when doctors discovered a huge mass in his chest. It had moved his heart towards the centre and begun crushing one of his lungs in the process. His parents had been worried for a while that their Lego -loving son kept developing fevers, which made him very lethargic.
His mum Harri, from London , said: "What we started noticing at the end of 2020 was that he was getting low-grade fevers that were just knocking him out. "They were 37.8C, maybe pushing 38C, but they were to the point where he would not even sit upright.
He would lay there basically in the dark. "This started happening every four weeks, and then it started getting more frequent. "By the time we got to, I think it was around March or April 2021, he was getting them every two weeks - just really knocked out by something that didn't seem to have any other symptoms than a low-grade fever.
" Harri took Eddie to the GP , where tests showed nothing abnormal. A second doctor also ran blood tests, which failed to show anything unusual. The family asked for a referral to a specialist paediatrician and it was during that appointment that a chest X-ray was ordered.
"There was one symptom that really sticks in my mind and that is that we were reading a bedtime story and Eddie was really out of breath for no reason," Harri said. "I said that to the paediatrician and he said, 'OK, I'm going to add a chest X-ray as well' to the other tests he was doing." Eddie underwent several tests .
