Hello, my name is George McGovern. I am 40 years old. I have four beautiful children. Unfortunately for us, though, our youngest daughter, Ellie Mae McGovern, developed stage 4 neuroblastoma last January. She went through chemotherapy, and the tumour shrunk in her belly from 13 1/2 centimetres to 5 and a bit centimetres. She also had a metastasis in her jaw, which is like a tumour in your bone. This time, however, she has a tumour growing in between her outer mouth and inside her mouth. An oncologist today put it to me like this: it’s like the shape of a cauliflower. It’s already been seen visually by the doctors who put a fourth central line in yesterday. They could observe it in her mouth, and then on the outside of her mouth is so swollen that she’s in so much pain. We’ve been told to get the palliative team involved, and we’re just lost because you know we have three other children, and we don’t drive, so swapping over positions is costly. We don’t know what’s going to happen to Ellie. If we’re being completely honest, she’s had mucusitis which is a side-effect of high-dose chemo. She also got severe veno-occlusive disease, which is another serious side-effect, life-threatening from high-dose chemo. But after she got over those tremendous ordeal. She’s received radiotherapy in September, and then after September‘s radiotherapy, they did what’s called an MIBG scan, where they inject radioactive dye into the body, and it sticks to the cancer and is highlighted yellow. When she first went in last January, she lit up like a Christmas tree, but mainly they’re very bright areas where the 13 1/2 cm tumour was and the 4 to 5 cm tumour in her jaw bone was. But now, waiting in a world difference now because they’ve given it their best chance, and she’s relapsed, so now we’re just hoping and praying that the chemo she started today, one of them, she couldn’t have. She was supposed to have three medicines today, but because she had an operation yesterday, one of the medications make you bleed, so she can’t have that until the next session in three weeks. But I’ve never seen Ellie crying so much, slapping her Mum in the face, slapping me in the face. She’s just very unhappy, very depressed, and in immense amounts of pain it’s killing me and Joanne literally from the inside out. I know people donated to our last fundraiser, kindly set up by Lynn Ryder with support from her partner and other donators and stuff, and that was so kind, and we are so grateful, but at the moment, we haven’t got much coming in but a lot going out, so we’re just asking for anything really, pennies, anything that anyone’s got to spare because we’re really scared. You know, I’ve got to be honest, we are terrified. We understand of you can’t donate and even sharing and liking is appreciated. We honestly feel empty inside Ellie is a beautiful little girl whose only loved 2 short years on this earth marred by this terrible disease.

UPDATE : Her tumour burst open and she lost quite a bit of blood that’s the second transfusion today she is now in ICU on a ventilator in am induced coma

Thanks for reading and have a nice day