Help Lucas's family through his cancer treatment

This is an appeal to provide financial support to a family struggling through the awful experience of having a sick child.

After months of intermittent pain and misdiagnosis, on the evening of 14th January 2022 Lucas and his mum were being transferred almost 50 miles by ambulance to Southampton hospital’s Piam Brown ward – an inpatient cancer ward. Lucas was five years old at the time, and the doctors had identified masses on his stomach, kidney, and pancreas. We later found out that Lucas has anaplastic large cell lymphoma, a rare type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

It took three long, brutal weeks to get to this diagnosis, and Lucas had been in hospital with the same symptoms the previous September. This positive, confident, chatty bundle of energy was fading. His weight had plummeted; he couldn’t keep any food down. Repeatedly, his parents were told he was just constipated. How they wished that were the case. In truth, the mass on his pancreas was preventing food from passing through his stomach, and causing excruciating pain. Even under a general anaesthetic, the doctors were unable to pass a feeding tube to help keep him nourished.

Although Lucas is now responding well to chemotherapy, he still has months of intense treatment ahead of him.

His parents were reluctant to put this in the public domain and expose the trials of such a young child but the financial consequences of his illness are now taking too much of a toll on the family. Like many people in the “squeezed middle”, the family were already struggling to make ends meet, and living off of credit cards to cover basics like childcare costs for Lucas’s two-year old sister. Now, having lost more than half of their income due to Lucas’s full-time care needs, whilst still not being eligible for any financial aid unless one parent gives up their future job security entirely, the mounting costs are becoming unmanageable.

Though these fundraising sites require a financial target to be set, any money donated will be so gratefully received and will be used to help:

• Fund the regular cost of travel to and from chemotherapy treatments and appointments;

• Pay for repairs and upgrades to the windows and old, series 7 storage heaters in their house, to make the family house as safe as possible for Lucas while he is immunocompromised; and

• Support the family with general bills (including keeping up with Lucas’s food cravings brought on by the steroid treatments!)

Even small donations will hugely help this family, and allow them to focus their worries on getting their little boy well and back to playing chase with his little sister.

Thank you (from a friend of the family)