James and Sophie Rushby just thought their daughter Ottilie had a small lump on her head. They never could have expected she’d be diagnosed with a shocking illness.

This past May, James and Sophie brought their one-year-old daughter Ottilie to the doctor after noticing a small lump on her head. Just hours after visiting the doctor, a CT scan found a large tumor and Ottilie was diagnosed with high-risk neuroblastoma — a rare cancer which had already spread to her skull, spine and bone marrow.

“Within half an hour, we were pulled into this private room…and [the specialist] told us that Ottilie had a large tumor growing on the side of her head,” recalled James, 41, to the BBC.

“This was just a complete bolt out of the blue for a little girl who was healthy and hadn’t had any pains or signs and symptoms, to be told she had a large tumor in her head, which is just world-shattering,” he continued.

After the initial diagnosis, James and his family were “blue-lighted” to a specialist unit at Nottingham’s Queen’s Medical Center. That next week, James said they had “one of the worst weeks we could ever imagine.”

“Ottilie was put through so many tests and procedures, and she had five general anesthetics in five days, MRI scans, surgery to her head for a biopsy,” he explained. “The oncologist gave us the horrendous news that it was cancer.”

His family was told that Ottilie’s cancer started in her kidney and spread throughout her body, through bone marrow into her spine and head.

“At this point, obviously, we were just in pieces to have all this information thrown at us when just two days earlier we were at home living a normal, happy life,” James said.

Ottilie now faces 12 to 18 months of treatment, which will include chemotherapy, surgery, blood transfusions, stem cell transplant, radiotherapy and immunotherapy.

James explained that Ottilie has been given a 30% to 50% survival rate on her current treatment plan. However, there’s a vaccine trial that’s taking place at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, where James hopes to take his family after Ottilie’s current treatment plan in the U.K.

James said that Ottilie’s “emergency intensive chemotherapy” began on May 21. She will undergo a 70-day cycle in which she’ll have three to four days of chemotherapy, followed by three to four days of rest.

Sophie told the outlet that Ottilie is currently “really well,” which makes it “harder to get in your head because she’s up and running around, laughing and playing…but obviously, she is really poorly.”

“We’ve got Archie as well, who’s five, and so you don’t have the time really to fall apart. You have to have it together for the kids,” she added.

The family has also started a GoFundMe page to help with their expenses. As of Wednesday, June 3, over £60,000 (over $80,000) of the £300,000 (over $400,000) target has been raised.