BRAVE Eileidh Paterson is fighting one of the most aggressive childhood cancers there is - but the two-year-old has never stopped smiling.

She has already endured more than 40 dozes of gruelling chemotherapy, three weeks of radiotherapy, a bone marrow transplant and 29 blood transfusions.

Now she faces even more treatment - and one of the main side-effects is extreme pain.

But her proud mother Gail, 38, from Forres, Moray, said: "She has gone through it all with a big smile. I don't know how she has done it. She's a little warrior.

"She is always happy and chirpy. And of all she's had done to her, the thing she hates the most is getting a sticky plaster put on her toe for the sats monitor. It can sometimes take four or five nurses to hold her down and, the minute it is on, she pulls it off again.

"There's not much that bothers her. She puts up with it all and never bats an eyelid."

She was diagnosed after her mother took her GP in May, because she was concerned with her breathing.

Mrs Paterson said just five days later, Eileidh's stomach was so swollen she looked pregnant.

In a four-hour operation in August surgeons managed to remove the stage 4 neuroblastoma, which filled more than half her abdomen.

But she has spent the last eight months fighting the disease with a cocktail of gruelling cancer drugs, as part of a clinical trial to save her life.

Her mother was warned that one of the drugs could also leave her fighting leukaemia.

But she said: "If she didn't get it, she would unlikely survive the neuroblastoma. So getting leukaemia was a lot better than the alternative."

Now Eileidh faces six months of immunotherapy treatment as part of the pioneering trial that aims to keep the cancer, which has an 80 per cent chance of coming back, at bay.

Mrs Paterson said: "Extreme pain is the biggest side-effect because the immunotherapy attacks every nerve cell in the body."

Eileidh is one of 2,300 children in Europe to be selected to receive the immunotherapy, which aims to train the body to attack cancer like a cold if it returns.

But with no guarantees of success and no formal relapse protocol for the disease in the UK, she is looking to raise the £350,000 she would need to take her daughter to America if the cancer returned.

Mrs Paterson said: "Hopefully it won't come back and we won't need it.

"But making sure she survives is the only thing that matters."

At one stage the disease, which started in her adrenal gland and spread to her bone marrow, lower left jaw, pancreas, and lymph nodes, grew so fast it ruptured a vein in her right kidney.

Eileidh also had to have five litres of blood drained from her chest, that was crushing her lung.

Mrs Paterson said: "The worst part is not being able to help make it better. If I could take it away from her I would.

"No two-year-old should have to go through this. But she just seems to get on with it. Even when she was getting her stem cell harvest, she was bouncing up and down like a concertina."

Eileidh, who has been treated in hospitals in Aberdeen and Glasgow, is now looking forward to spending Christmas at home with her family, before her next treatment starts after the new year.

Mrs Paterson said: "Fingers crossed the immunotherapy works and the cancer won't come back. But even if it works, there will always be that fear. It could come back in two years or five years. It really has a mind of it's own.

"But making sure she survives is the only thing that matters. And right now she is just so happy to be back home."

To donate to Eileidh's cause, visit Facebook page, Eileidh's Journey, or www.justgiving.com/EileidhsJourney