A mum dying from an aggressive brain tumour has revealed she is writing birthday cards for her two-year-old son to open when she is gone.
Tyla Livingstone, 22, from Fife, Scotland, says she has between two and five years to live after being diagnosed with glioblastoma - the most common and deadliest form of malignant brain cancer - in February 2018.
She told The Sun: "It's heartbreaking. I feel so guilty over something I cannot control.
"But I will fight to see as much as I can. My main aim is to see him go to school and for him to remember who I am and my voice.
"But I’ll always be with him in his hear
The symptoms did not show until Tyla, then 20 years old, was at 31 weeks pregnant.
She suddenly felt sharp abdominal pain and had to take a bath to relieve them.
While in the bathtub, her hand seized up and a strange sensation travelled up her arm.
She jumped out of the bath and screamed for her grandmother, but soon she blacked out.
She was told she had suffered a seizure and was jerking about.
Tyla was taken to hospital where doctors performed an MRI scan on her. It revealed that there was a two-centimetre mass growing at the left frontal lobe of her brain.
She said she was told it was likely to be benign and that if it was cancerous she was likely to recover.
In January 12, 2018, she gave birth to her baby boy Preston a week early at the Royal Victoria Hospital.
But a month into motherhood, Tyla became paralysed on one side after going out for a drink with her partner Mark.
Blaming the alcohol, Tyla ignored the symptoms for two days before she was persuaded to see her GP.
She was taken to a hospital for further checkups.
It was then she found out the devastating news that it was a grade-four glioblastoma - one of the most aggressive forms of brain tumour.
She said it is nicknamed 'The Terminator' because so few people survive longer than five years.
Tyla underwent chemotherapy, brain surgery and radiotherapy but it would only destroy some cells but not all.
Tyla said she now wants to make the most of her time left with Preston.
She said she will start by writing birthday cards soon so he can open them when she is gone.
She is also saving things for him including locks of hair and a radiotherapy mask.
"I need him to know his mummy fought desperately hard to be with him, that she loved him so, so much and didn’t choose to leave him," she added.
Tyla is now 14 months past her diagnosis but she is determined to make memories with Preston as much as she can.
