THE tiny girl stirs in her hospital bed, slowly waking from the surgery she didn't need, for an illness she doesn't have.

Her face is slack, her cheeks flushed. Her tiny body is covered in hives from the platelets they gave her because she doesn't seem able to make her own.

Mum admits chemo poisoning

Doctors have inserted a central line into her thin little chest. A tube has been put in her nose and another punctures the crook of her arm.

Her mother has been told to expect the worst. Her little girl will soon die - gone before she had a chance to live.

The young mum leans forward and snaps a photograph with her camera. Within minutes it will be uploaded to a Facebook page she maintains with meticulous care. Thousands of people around the world have followed the progress of her little girl's terrible illness, cocooning her in words of comfort and pity.

"Nervous tonight. Don't know if I will be able to sleep,'' she wrote on February 12, the night before surgeons inserted her daughter's central line.

"Hopefully we can find a reason why she got this horrible disease. Hopefully, when she is older, she can look back on everything she had done and realise how strong she is.''

Two months later, baffled doctors find that reason.

For 10 months they had run test after test on the four-year-old, operating numerous times as they searched for a donor for a lifesaving bone marrow transplant.

They crossed leukemia off the list, searched for tumours and eventually diagnosed severe aplastic anaemia. But nothing fit as well as the reaction a body has when subjected to long-term chemotherapy use.

Their suspicions grew and police were called. Investigators discovered the 22-year-old mum had been buying the drug online from an overseas website and giving it to her little girl.

Then she carefully catalogued every test, every procedure, every bleed and every bruise her daughter endured for her audience of thousands.

Yesterday, the Gold Coast mum admitted to having poisoned her daughter for nearly a year. Looking dishevelled in a pink and grey, football-style T-shirt, her hair in a straggly ponytail, the woman pleaded guilty to grievous bodily harm, a charge that carries a maximum term of 14 years.

In the years and months before creating a Facebook page to document her daughter's "illness'', the woman tried other attention-seeking tactics.

"I am 21 and was diagnosed last week,'' she wrote on a YouTube video clip about the disease.

"Don't be fooled, this cancer is no longer an old ­people's cancer. It can happen to anyone and most of the time without symptoms … take care everyone xx.''

On another video she claimed to suffer from cluster headaches.

"I don't think there is a worse fate then these demon headaches. I hope for all of us sufferers out there they find a cure,'' she wrote.

On yet another video, the young woman wrote of her battles with eating disorders. "I am a diagnosed purging anorexic … I have so many problems with my heart, liver, kidneys and teeth ... Save yourself!!!''

By December 2012 she was posting several times a day on her "Hope for (daughter's name)'' page.

She claimed it was earlier that year that she first noticed something wrong. Strange bruises had appeared on her little girl's legs, arms and back and other "unusual places''.

It was close to Christmas when doctors broke the news that the girl's condition was "permanent''.

"I am barely holding it together and I am not the sick one. I can't imagine what my poor daughter is going through and will go through for the rest of her life,'' she wrote.

In January she wrote: "Minutes after typing my last comment (name withheld) started to hemmorhage out of her nose, a 000 call later and a ride in the ambulance and 20 minutes of gushing blood we have finally got it to stop ... Gosh too much drama for 3am ...''

By March the little girl had apparently "coded'' and was struggling to breathe.

In April, doctors told the mother the girl would be dead in six months if they could not find a bone marrow donor.

Just hours before police took her into custody, the woman posted a picture of the frail girl, her eyelashes and eyebrows gone, her skin pale, with the words: "(Name withheld) is not to well at the moment so will post more pics later ... x.''

It was the last post the girl's mother would write.

Six months on, the little girl, who was given no more than that to live, has made a remarkable recovery.

Doctors are hopeful she can lead a normal life, although it is impossible to tell what long-term effects the poisoning might have.

Her mother will be sentenced at a later date.

(NOTE: An earlier version of this story carried a photo of a child unrelated to the story. The Courier-Mail apologises for the error.)

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Originally published as 'I poisoned my little girl for attention'