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A mom in England is speaking out years after her daughter’s death. Chloe Venton died at the age of 17, two years after her mom began a fight to find out what illness was affecting her. When Chloe was 15, she began exhibiting concerning symptoms.
Her mom Joanne took her to the doctor, but her doctor believed that the teen girl had a UTI. She was sent home with antibiotics. It was a vicious cycle for months until her mom finally put a stop to it by demanding additional testing. That’s when they learned that the teen had bone cancer. As she was being treated for that, she was diagnosed with another form of cancer.
Her symptoms first began when she was 15 years old.
In 2017, Chloe began waking up in the night “screaming in agony,” her mom Joanne Venton told Southwest News Service. She was also sweating profusely, and kept needing to go to the bathroom.
“She had UTIs as a child so the doctors just brushed it off as that and gave her antibiotics,” Venton explained. “Over the next seven months I lost count of how many times we went back to the doctors as the antibiotics weren’t working.”
According to Venton, one day, Chloe called her from college and she took her back to the doctor, where again, her symptoms were brushed off as a UTI. The teen was experiencing lower back pain which then spread to her hips. As a result, she was experiencing numbness in her lower body and was losing control of her bladder.
Joanne knew something wasn’t right, and she was determined to find out what was happening.
The mom knew that her teenage daughter’s symptoms were not “normal” for someone her age. But she “knew something else was wrong,” and shared that she “refused” to leave the doctor’s office.
“The GP then sent us to the hospital just to shut me up, and that’s where the scans first revealed the tumor,” she said. Again, because her daughter was just a teen, she presumed “it’s something not as sinister, you think it may be an injury or anything else.”
In May 2018, Chloe Venton was referred to Great Western Hospital, Swindon, where she underwent her first test. After the discovery of the tumor, she was sent to John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford. There, she underwent blood tests, MRIs and CT scans. She also saw a spinal specialist.
“We were pushed to different teams because no one knew what was going on,” Joanne said. “I was about to discharge her, but a consultant took me and my husband to the side and said they were so concerned and to keep her in hospital.”
They were about to get the news that was going to change everything.
The next morning, Joanne and her husband Gary were taken into a “small, cold white room” by the doctor and told that Chloe had cancer. She was diagnosed with Ewing sarcoma, a type of bone cancer. “It was a whirlwind from there,” she said.
“In my head, I thought she can’t have cancer; cancer is for people that abuse their bodies or have a genetic condition. I couldn’t believe in my head that my teenage daughter had it.”
At the time, Chloe, who wanted to be a doctor, was doing a work placement at a local hospital. She had worked with cancer patients there, which may have helped her throughout her own diagnosis.
“When she got the diagnosis, she was so grown up, asking the doctor questions, and she already knew a lot about the treatment process. It was bizarre, but her placement eased her mind when she got diagnosed,” Joanne explained.
Within hours, Chloe was being treated for cancer.
She did 10 rounds of chemotherapy, proton therapy, and then another five rounds of chemo. Then, Chloe developed a rash and got very sick again. Doctors believed it was just a side effect of her treatment.
“Again, I had to fight the doctors that something wasn’t right,” Joanne said. “That rash turned out to be leukemia cutis, leukemia of the skin, and she was also diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, a blood cancer that starts in the bone marrow.”
Chloe Venton died unexpectedly in July 2020 at the age of 17. Her mother called the experience a “complete nightmare.”
“It breaks my heart to think Chloe may still be here if they hadn’t misdiagnosed her at first and then missed the leukemia,” Joanne said. “I want to talk about it so other people don’t get missed in the system and end up losing their daughter like that.”
During the conversation, Joanne remembered her daughter’s “infectious” laugh, “amazing” smile, and “had the biggest heart.”
“In her final days, she said to me, ‘I’ll never see my brothers grow up and get married and I’ll never get to be the auntie I want to be,’” Joanne said, adding that the comment “broke” her.
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