A mum is campaigning to get more people on the bone marrow register after her daughter was diagnosed with leukaemia.

Chloe Entwistle, from Gillingham, said she thought “life was over” when she was told the news about two-year-old Florence.

The family were given the devastating diagnosis on Easter Sunday, when the toddler was just 23 months old.

The 27-year-old said: “Everything was really normal for us leading up to this, there were no major red flags, it just happened so quickly.

“We were at Whitstable literally the day before having fish and chips on the beach, it was just so normal.

“The following morning we got up, we were prepping our Sunday roast and I noticed she had tiny blood spots around her skin under her eyes, like little pin pricks.”

She looked online and results for petechiae came up, which is a symptom of leukaemia.

“Instantly this feeling came over my body and I knew, all the symptoms were aligning because she had bruises on her legs the week before,” she said.

Chloe, her husband Jack and their son Freddie, seven, took Florence to A&E at Medway Maritime Hospital straight away and it went “so quickly from there”.

She explained: “Her platelets were on the floor, her haemoglobin was on the floor, she needed transfusions, and her white blood count was all over the place.”

An X-ray showed Florence had an enlarged spleen and her parents were taken into a room and told she had leukaemia.

“It was very traumatic and chaotic – it was the worst day of our lives,” Chloe said.

“I thought life was over at that point, you just do instantly think the worst – but luckily there is so much they can do now for leukaemia.”

Florence was taken to St George’s Hospital in London and is now nearly five months into her two-year chemotherapy treatment.

Chloe said: “She is generally doing as well as she can be. She’s very feisty and has a lot of fight behind her which keeps me going because if she wasn’t I think that would take its toll on me.

“She is so smiley and happy. In one day she’ll have four lots of chemo and she’ll come home the same day and will be running around like she hadn’t just been in hospital having all these medicines.

“It just blows my mind, and I know she’s not the only one because other parents and friends of mine say the same, they’re so resilient.”

Chloe is campaigning alongside other parents to get more people on the bone marrow register, in support of blood cancer charity DKMS.

A bone marrow transplant replaces the unhealthy stem cells with healthy ones and for some people this can cure leukaemia.

The group of mums and dads will be at the Dockside Outlet Centre in Chatham on Sunday (September 17) between 9am and 2pm and have been sent 1,000 swabs so people can register, and be tested for potential matches.

Chloe said: “Only 3% of the UK are on the DKMS register but it’s just not enough because there’s so many children waiting for matches.

“It will just be a quick swab of the cheek and it’ll take 15 minutes maximum for them to register themselves, swab their cheek and pop it back to us.

“There’s a lot of misconceptions about being on the bone marrow register, but it’s not nearly as invasive as I think people think it’s going to be or is.

“My reasons for being on this campaign along with these mums is because you’re all like one big family when you’re on the ward and you get fully invested in other children’s journeys as much as your own.

“This is the only course of treatment for a lot of children, especially if they have a more aggressive type of leukaemia.

“It’s something that could happen to Florence if she was to relapse.

“She’s currently in remission but if she was to relapse that would most likely be her next course of treatment.

“I feel so passionately about it because if the leukaemia cells were to come back, I would be screaming for the rooftops to get people to swab.

“Most of the time you’re relying on a stranger to selflessly save your child’s life.”

After doing the cheek swab and registering, you may be contacted if you are a match and can become a donor in two ways.

The first method is peripheral blood stem cell collection which involves blood stem cells being collected from the donor by removing blood from one arm and running it through a machine to separate out the blood stem cells.

The blood is then returned to the donor through the other arm. Around 90% of donations are carried out with this method, which takes four to six hours.

“If the leukaemia cells were to come back, I would be screaming for the rooftops to get people to swab...”

The other method is bone marrow collection, which is where the bone marrow stem cells are collected from the bone marrow from the back of the hip bone using a syringe.

It is carried out under general anaesthetic and takes one to two hours, however recovery can take up to a week.

For more about becoming a bone marrow donor, click here.

It is open to healthy people aged between 17 and 55 who have lived in the UK for two years or more.