Sisters diagnosed with cancer within 48 hours

Two English sisters who were both diagnosed with cancer within 48 hours of each other have now beaten the disease.

Leanne Barber, 29, was diagnosed with leukaemia in October 2009. Two days later her 22-year-old sister Hayley Todd was told she had Hodgkins Lymphoma.

The diagnoses were completely unrelated and left doctors stunned.

"Just a few weeks before we had been to the cinema together to see the film My Sister's Keeper where one sister gets leukaemia and dies at the end," Ms Barber told the Daily Mail.

"We had both been in tears after watching it and never in a million years thought that just a few weeks later we'd be fighting the disease ourselves."

The sisters credit each other with keeping their spirits high throughout the gruelling treatments and hospital visits.

Ms Barber was the first to notice signs of cancer when she saw bruises on her legs and then her arms.

After she spat up blood, she went to hospital and was told she had leukaemia two hours later.

The levels of cancer in her blood were so high she was rushed to Newcastle Hospital where she began chemotherapy treatment immediately.

Ms Todd was at the hospital with her sister and was listed as a potential candidate if a bone marrow transplant was needed.

But before any tests could be carried out, she had a lump that she had noticed a couple of months earlier checked.

She was diagnosed with Hodgkins Lymphoma.

The sisters were in treatment simultaneously as they both battled the disease.

"I was so poorly… Hayley came to visit me and sat by my bedside in between her bouts of chemotherapy treatment," Ms Barber said.

"Mum would come to hospital and visit me and then go with Hayley when she had chemotherapy too."

Ms Todd's treatment finished in May last year and Ms Barber's finished two months later. They are now both in remission.

"We didn’t even have a chance to help each other because we were both fighting for our lives. But I couldn't have go through it without Leanne and she couldn’t without me," Ms Todd said.

"It has brought us even closer."