Heartfelt condolences have been expressed for a 19-year-old who died after her 'sports injury' turned out to be cancer.
Teen Lulu Blundell was diagnosed with Ewing’s Sarcoma, which is a rare type of cancer that affects bones or the tissue around bones, back in 2019, when she was just 15, The Mirror reported.
Following demanding chemotherapy and the pain of having her leg amputated, Lulu from Rotherham, South Yorkshire was told she no longer had cancer.
She began to get a pain in her shoulder during her time as a student at a university last April, which she thought was just a sporting injury.
However, after a doctor ordered CT scan - Lulu received the heartbreaking news that she had new tumours in her shoulder, ribs, and chest, and that her cancer was terminal.
With only a limited time left, Lulu travelled to Magaluf with four friends, Amsterdam with her boyfriend Paddy, and spent time on family trips to London, Northumberland and Manchester.
In September, she completed Run with Lulu, a charity 5k she established with her family and rugby club in aid of Teenage Cancer Trust.
It was captured in a film, 'Lulu: Forever 19', which shows her inspiring words and thoughts on living with cancer and a terminal diagnosis.
Lulu ran the event on her prosthetic with a broken shoulder blade, while the tumour was inside her, and raised over £21k to help others suffering with cancer.
Tragically, just weeks after event a scan showed that Lulu’s cancer had spread more quickly than expected, and that she had only months left to live, not years, as she had previously thought.
Come December and Lulu was too sick to leave the house.
The 19-year-old sadly died on New Year's Day this year while surrounded by her family and loved ones.
Reflecting on her daughter's final weeks, mum Carolyn Blundell told Yorkshire Live: “When you realise that you have so little time with someone you become really present in the moment. Right through last summer, and especially after we found out the cancer had spread, we basked in every little thing we did together.
"You can’t manufacture that situation and there were moments of spectacularly pure beauty and love. Even memories of watching Love Island with Lulu, her brother Seth and Paddy are really precious.
“But nothing could have prepared us for those last few weeks. We didn’t think she’d make it to Christmas, but she wanted to show Robin, her oncology consultant, that she’d get to 2023, and she made it to New Year’s Day.”
She also said that there was a "lot more to Lulu than her cancer", and that she had a lust for life, for others, and had a spontaneity that rubbed off on other people wherever she went
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