Doctors accuse 4-year-old boy of faking his symptoms for attention, then mum discovers the horrifying truth

A mum from Coventry has spoken out about how doctors kept telling her that her young son was fine, when he was actually sick with a serious disease from the Victorian times. Megan West, who is 25 years old, first noticed her four-year-old son Elliot was not walking right in December 2024. He was putting his feet too wide and swinging his arms around in a strange way.

According to LadBible, West took Elliot to see the doctor many times because things got worse. He started sweating at night, lost so much weight that you could see his ribs sticking out, and kept getting sick all the time. But the doctors kept saying it was just a virus. She says they also suggested that Elliot might be making things up to get attention because he had a new baby sister at home.

“The doctor told me he was neurologically intact and had good leg power and was likely doing it for attention because he had a baby sister,” West said. But Elliot kept saying his legs were not working properly, so West finally took him to the emergency room at Coventry Hospital in June 2025.

Things took a terrifying turn at the hospital

The X-rays showed there was something wrong with the lymph nodes in Elliot’s lungs, and that is when doctors found out what was really happening. The little boy had spinal tuberculosis, which doctors also call Pott’s disease. This is when a bacterial infection gets into the bones of your spine after starting in your lungs. People used to get this disease a lot back in Victorian times, but it is really uncommon now in countries like the UK.

This kind of tuberculosis makes your back hurt a lot and can make your arms and legs feel weak. If you do not get treatment, your spine can get bent out of shape or the bones can get damaged, and in some cases people can die from it. The symptoms are pain in your back and neck, weak arms and legs, not wanting to eat, losing weight without trying, and having a fever. West thinks all the things the doctors brushed off as just a virus were actually warning signs of this infection. In situations where medical concerns are dismissed, parents often find themselves fighting for proper care for their loved ones.

The news was really scary because when Elliot said his legs did not work, it was actually because his spinal cord was getting squeezed by the disease. “I absolutely did not expect it to be this, it was a massive shock,” West said. “We were just scared for him, shocked and terrified for what he was going to have to go through and how it would be fixed.”

Elliot had to have surgery on his spine at Birmingham Children’s Hospital in September 2024. The doctors connected some of the bones in his spine together to stop them from moving and causing pain. It was a really risky operation, and if he did not have it done, he might have ended up paralyzed. Luckily, everything went well with the surgery. Now he is taking medicine for tuberculosis and getting better, but he can only walk and is not allowed to run yet. He might need to have another operation in the next six months if the lump on his spine has not gotten smaller.

West says she is not angry at Elliot’s doctor because she knows tuberculosis is hard to figure out in kids. But she does wish they had taken her worries more seriously and put all the pieces together. She wants other parents to know they should listen to their gut feelings and keep asking questions when they think something is wrong with their child. Cases like this remind us of other mysterious situations where initial clues led to answers, though medical mysteries require persistent advocacy from loved ones.