A four-year-old boy has defied doctors expectations by successfully battling a watermelon-sized growth on his face that nearly choked him to death.
Mateo de Jesús Márquez Juárez, from Mexico, suffers from lymphangioma – which causes life-threatening cysts to grow on his chin, neck and face.
Doctors spotted the malformations during an ultrasound and recommended that his parents should abort him because he ‘would not survive’.
But the youngster, from Xalapa, defied their expectations when he entered the world and was kept alive, hooked up to breathing tubes.
Mateo’s cysts continued to swell to the size of a large watermelon, prompting cruel strangers and schoolchildren to brand him a monster.
Now, after two life-changing operations to reduce the tumours they are apple-sized, he is doing ‘wonderfully’, but his family are fundraising for more treatment in the US.
It’s hoped they will remove some of the loose skin left by the malformations as well as shrinking and draining other cysts to give Mateo a better life.
