Torrance toddler battling cancer advances in ‘Baby of the Year’ contest

A South Bay family is turning a heartbreaking diagnosis into a story of hope and they need your help. 15-month-old Brynn of Torrance is facing a rare childhood cancer called LCH. Her family though is bringing light to her journey by entering her in the Baby of the Year contest. Now undergoing chemotherapy, Brynn has officially reached the top five in her group and she needs your help to advance to the next round. Michelle and Brett are Brynn's mom and dad and they join us now to share more about Brynn's journey. Thanks for joining us. Thanks so much for having us. Thank you for having us. First question, mom, what is LCH and how is Brynn actually doing now? So LCH stands for Langerhans cell histiocytosis. It's a very rare cancer that only affects one in every 200 children. Um we had never heard of it before. I mean, sorry, 200,000, not 200. um we had never heard of it before she was diagnosed um it's actually he can explain it better it's basically with LCH it causes genetic mutations in the genes that can um probably can manifest in many different ways for our daughter it happened to be tumors behind her ears so she was um we noticed her ears were kind of protruding out and she had some weird smells for a few months right out of her ears and had her checked out and then they were able to diagnose that pretty pretty quickly well she's absolutely precious in the pictures that you provided us yes absolutely beautiful baby talk about entering the baby of the year competition so we entered actually he entered us um we thought it was just something to kind of bring light to our situation and it's actually turned into something more meaningful to us since then and we're really just trying to raise awareness for this disease and you know also while supporting Baby to Baby which is where any donations go to that are made through the comp the competition um and baby to baby helps children that are in poverty with basic needs because LCH is so rare there there's still a lot of tests and trial phases and treatment options um they've been working on for a while but everything is still, you know, being tested and they're trying to find more research and more cures and things like that. So, you know, we try to use our platform to be able to bring more light to this and more awareness and help, you know, further on the treatments for other children and even adults that are going through the same thing so people understand this a little bit more. Well, if she actually wins the competition, that's $25,000. That's a nice chunk of change that would certainly help in this situation. for sure thank you yeah we're both uh full-time we work full-time i own a small business so obviously you know time time off of work and medical expenses and things like that so um this would definitely help towards that as well as we have a GoFundMe that people have been more than generous to help us along the way with you know time missed from work medical expenses um child care you know and things like that we wanted to also pay it forward and donate portion to childhood pediatric cancer um just to kind of do what we can to help help awareness and like you said treatment options and stuff for LCH and other childhood problems all right so quickly it's all about people voting tell us how they can vote so there should be i think a link on the website um if you just go there we go you can also go on the Fox Live uh website and it'll be there as well and any vote is great for us a free vote you could do one every 24 hours um and any donations of course are appreciated but anything more than that you know we're just happy to get her story out there and appreciate anyone who's listening we wanted to thank Fox and as well as our family our friends Miller's Children's hospital everybody that's helped us I mean even people that we've never even met before that have reached out and prayers and and everything so we really appreciate everyone's help and navigating this well we wish you the best of luck Michelle and Brett and beautiful Brynn we thank you for sharing the photos and videos super super cute we wish you well