24/06/2026
The heartbreaking story of Chloe, she is a beautiful soul inside and out.
I will be doing a charity TOTALFIT … Move for Chloe… details to follow! 💪🏻❤️
After being told she has incurable cancer, a heartbroken mum-of-two has told how she can barely look at her young children, aged one and four, without feeling an overwhelming sense of guilt that she is about to leave them behind.💔
Chloe Houghton, a fit and active 32-year-old beauty salon owner, received the devastating diagnosis after discovering a lump on her chest - which she was repeatedly reassured was just a harmless cyst.
However when she finally had it removed, doctors diagnosed her with stage four Small Cell lung cancer, after discovering that the disease had already spread.
"I've never smoked or vaped in my life but all you need for lung cancer is a pair of lungs," Chloe, from Northamptonshire, told the Daily Mirror.
Chloe first noticed the small mass while in the shower. Though it was only a few millimetres wide at the time, it began growing rapidly and became painful when she picked up her son.
A doctor initially told Chloe the lump was likely just a bit of cartilage. Because the mass moved when she pressed it, she was assured it was a "good" sign and highly unlikely to be cancerous.
Following a series of follow-up visits to the doctor and blood tests that all came back clear, Chloe pushed to have the lump removed in August 2025.
"It was getting bigger and you could notice it on my chest so I was having to wear higher neckline tops to cover it," she explained. "I wanted it off because it was hurting me when I picked my son up."
After waiting weeks without receiving a surgery date, Chloe sought a second opinion from a different doctor. This GP referred her to a sarcoma clinic as a protocol, and booked her in for general surgery.
By February 2026, Chloe was still waiting for the operation, and the lump had expanded to two centimetres.
During a hospital consultation, her mother told the doctor that Chloe's weight had dropped down from 10 stone to just seven.😥
Alarmed by the rapid weight loss, the consultant ordered an urgent CT scan of her chest, abdomen and pelvis.
Six weeks later, the results flagged an abnormality on her lungs that needed further investigation.
On the day that the chest lump was finally removed, the consultant admitted he was far more worried about her lungs than the mass itself, which he suspected was an infected cyst.
Three weeks later, Chloe received an unexpected call telling her to meet with the consultant "as soon as possible" and to bring a relative with her.
Accompanied by her mother and her husband, former firefighter Jamie who she married last July, Chloe received the shattering results.
The biopsy showed she had neuroendocrine sarcoma.
"The consultant said it was a secondary cancer," Chloe said.
"The primary cancer was in my lung. What they had removed was the tumour that had already spread outside of the lung into my chest."
Initially doctors were hopeful, suggesting chemotherapy followed by surgery to remove the cancerous part of the lung, because she was young, fit and healthy.
Chloe was told that if she had been an older smoker, doctors would have considered lung cancer as a possibility much sooner.
However, the optimism was brutally short-lived. A week later, her lung cancer nurse called with devastating news: the mass was Small Cell lung cancer - an aggressive, fast-growing form of the disease that accounts for 10% to 15% of cases and is almost exclusively linked to to***co use in older adults. Because it had already metastasised, surgery was completely off the table.
A subsequent meeting with her oncologist confirmed that the advanced cancer would "significantly" reduce her life expectancy. As the cancer had spread outside of her lung, it meant they weren't able to operate and that it was "a case of chemotherapy and immunotherapy for as long as your body can tolerate it."
Chloe said: "I got upset straight away and all I said was 'I've got a one-year-old and a four-year-old. I'm not going to see them grow up, am I?'
"He turned around to me and said 'It would be incredibly cruel for me to say that you will'. Then everything just sort of stopped around me.💔
"After that, I didn't hear anything, because in my head all I kept thinking was 'I'm going to die. I'm not going to see my kids grow up.' It was just horrid."
In Chloe's case, her early symptoms were misdiagnosed, with her GP brushing off her extreme fatigue and breathlessness as the exhaustion from raising toddlers. Her sudden inability to eat was misdiagnosed as a stomach ulcer, for which she was booked for an endoscopy.
Since starting chemotherapy, these symptoms have disappeared.
Despite her terminal diagnosis, Chloe is channelling her remaining energy into helping others through TikTok, sharing her story openly to advocate for women's health.
