An eight-year-old girl survived stage IV cancer after doctors 'misread her scans' for three years.
Ellie Shoup, from Mounds View, Minnesota, was diagnosed with neuroblastoma, a cancer that forms in nerve tissue, when she was just 11 months old.
Doctors surgically removed her tumor and told her parents that she had a 90 to 95 percent chance of survival and didn't need any more treatment, reported KARE 11.
But, as it turns out, the physicians had been misreading Ellie's scans for years and, at age four, the family found out Ellie's cancer had progressed to stage four, meaning it had spread throughout her body.
Following months of aggressive treatment and enrollment in a clinical trial in New York, Ellie is now cancer-free.
Ellie's mother, Andrea Shoup, told KARE 11 that she was devastated when her daughter was first diagnosed as an infant.
'If there is anything that you don't prepare for in life, it is to be told that your child has cancer,' she said.
The tumor, which was in baby Ellie's neck, was removed, and, during follow-up appointments, doctors told her parents that she was 'fine'.
However, Shoup said she felt like something was wrong, and, in April 2015, she and her husband asked for a second opinion.
They learned that Ellie's cancer was not gone and, in fact, had spread. She now had stage IV neuroblastoma.
'We learned our team had misread our scans for three years,' Shoup told KARE 11.
'We wiped out our savings...and incurred a lot of debt. In the first year of treatment, our insurance was billed over a million dollars.'
Neuroblastoma is a cancer that develops in immature nerve cells throughout the body.