Jean Lambert had a fleeting opportunity to cradle her premature baby daughter in a hospital bed before medical professionals whisked her away. Having personally endured the challenges of a retained placenta, the new mom had to endure an excruciating wait of four or five hours before she could reunite with little Chloe again.

And as soon as she did, she was faced with the devastating sight of her precious daughter hooked up to machines in intensive care.

So when she and her husband Michael spotted a small ‘bruise’ on the right side of the youngster’s forehead, it was the least of their worries.

“We didn’t think much of it,” Jean told Mirror Online.

But over the next few weeks, as Chloe’s condition improved, the mark grew rapidly “like a strawberry” and took on a vivid red color.

As it turned out, it was actually a hemangioma.

Chloe’s hemangioma grew rapidly “like a strawberry” and turned a vivid red before becoming ulcerated.

The mark started “weighing down” the youngster’s eye.

Fast-forward to today and Chloe (pictured with mom Jean last summer) is a happy and healthy nine-year-old.

And in the following months, it grew more and more each day, eventually “weighing down” Chloe’s eye and becoming ulcerated.

Strangers would stare at the little girl in the street, while Jean and Michael had to be careful not to bang the area in case it bled.

“If it started to bleed, it would continue to bleed,” said Jean, from Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire. “We had to be careful not to knock it.”

Told there were no treatment options available and the mark would likely disappear someday on its own, the couple didn’t know what to do.

But fast-forward to today and their lives – and Chloe’s – have completely changed, after she was accepted onto a trial for a new treatment.

Now aged nine, the brave youngster, who has been left with just a small scar, proudly pins her hair back instead of insisting on a fringe.

And she happily tells her pals: “I’m a birthmark warrior.”

Chloe is pictured at 10 days old – by which point, the hemangioma had started to become obvious.

Strangers used to stare at the little girl in the street, with young kids even trying to touch her forehead.

A scab developed on the hemangioma, which grew to the size of a 50p piece.

“Chloe’s so proud,” said Jean.

“As she looks back at photos [of her hemangioma] she’ll ask about it. If people ask questions she’s very quick to say, ‘I had a birthmark’.”

The little girl was born eight weeks early in August 2009.

“I had a very easy, straightforward pregnancy, everything went fine. I was getting up for work the morning my waters broke,” Jean said.

“She arrived very quickly at 32 weeks. It was a normal delivery, gas and air. They tried to stop the labor, but there was no stopping it!”

Doctors let the new mom have a quick cuddle before she was treated for a retained placenta and Chloe was raced to intensive care.

“It was four or five hours before I could actually see her,” Jean recalled.

“That was awful.”

It was around a week later that doctors told her and Michael that the ‘bruise’ on their daughter’s forehead was actually a strawberry hemangioma.

The couple were told it would soon start to change color and gro