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8-year-old girl to undergo mastectomy after breast cancer diagnosis

Posted at 2:58 PM, Nov 25, 2015
and last updated 2015-11-25 15:03:19-05

CENTERVILLE, Utah -- An eight-year-old Utah girl is battling a rare form of breast cancer. Chrissy Turner's parents said their daughter came to them scared last month after she felt a lump in her chest. The lump, doctors later confirmed, was a very rare form of breast cancer called secretory carcinoma.

"Only one in one million are diagnosed and she is the youngest that they've run across having this particular type of breast cancer," Chrissy's mother Annette said. "I broke down. It's a struggle every day worrying about my family, about my husband and now my baby girl."

Chrissy's father, a Desert Storm veteran, was diagnosed with non-Hodkin's Lymphoma when Chrissy was a baby. Her mother Annette is a cervical cancer survivor.

"I was scared the first time that I knew about it but I knew, I knew that I could fight it off and I hope that I can fight it off," Chrissy said.

Friends of the family started a GoFundMe campaign to raise money to help pay Chrissy's medical bills.

"She was our therapy when he was going through chemotherapy. She was always making us laugh and she's got the wit of someone far beyond her age," Annette said. "We're just going to keep fighting and doing everything we can to smile every day and laugh every day and carry our head high and do our best to overcome this."

Chrissy will undergo a mastectomy at Huntsman Cancer Institute in Salt Lake City.