Rubie's - Kick Timmy the tumours butt fund!

My name is Rubie and I'm 9 and a half years old. I have an identical twin sister named Florence, secretly I call her my walking donor but she doesn't know about that yet. We live with mummy and our two big brothers, Dylan and Brodie. I really love being active and going to gymnastics club. I also like to play outside my house with my friends, playing basketball and riding my bike. I would really like to go to Thailand one day and visit the elephants. Me and my sister love elephants and have lots of cuddly ones. One day, while playing outside with my sister I hurt my shoulder. I went to school for a few days, but my shoulder still hurt, especially in the mornings. I didn't feel like eating much and had trouble sleeping, so mummy kept me home from school to rest my shoulder properly.

After a week, mummy took me to see the doctor to get my shoulder checked out. The doctor said I should keep resting it and taking medicine for the pain. But I still didn't feel like eating much and only wanted to drink water and eat fruit. The next day, we went to the hospital to get an x-ray of my shoulder because we thought maybe I had broken something. But the x-ray didn't show anything, and the doctors said it could be a strain or tear in my AC joint. They told me to keep resting and taking medicine for the pain. Then, two days after that, something new happened. I woke up with a different pain in my chest, and it was hard to breathe. Mommy rushed me back to the hospital, and they took blood tests. But the tests didn't show anything wrong. They said it might be deferred pain, and my shallow breathing could be because I hadn't been sleeping well and I felt really weak, even going downstairs was hard. I had to be carried back to bed because I was so tired one day.

On June 16th, when I was with my dad, I was really struggling to breathe, and I couldn't swallow water, it just wouldn’t go down. So my dad and I went to the A&E in Eastbourne and I walked in. The whole A&E was closed just for me because they needed to help me quickly and everyone seemed to be panicking. A special team came from the Evelina Children's Hospital in London to take care of me. They put me in an ambulance with my dad and rushed me to their hospital in London because I was in critical condition. It turns out I had a collapsed lung and lots of fluid around my heart and lungs. The team put drains into my chest and my heart to get the fluid out and found a big tumour in my chest.

They sent me in an ambulance with mummy to the children's intensive care ward in St. George's Hospital in Tooting. I had so many tubes and wires sticking out of me; I felt like a plug socket! They did lots of tests with different machines like X-rays, CT scans, and Ultrasounds to see inside me in the first couple of days. They found out that the tumour had grown over my heart and lungs and was pressing on my windpipe, which is why I had trouble drinking and breathing. That's also what was causing my shoulder pain all this time. The doctors wanted to do an MRI, but I couldn't lie down flat because of the tumor and the fluid on my chest.

I had some procedures done like a lumbar puncture and bone marrow retrieval. Mummy showed me the holes in my back on her phone. I also had a PICC line put in my arm for medicine, and they took a biopsy and removed a whole lymph node from my neck. I've been taking lots of medicines, and the nurses check on me every hour. I had a ventilator mask on my head which caused sores on my face, and one day a nurse named Christina brushed my hair because it was a mess and very knotty.

I'm still getting lots of fluids to keep my kidneys and liver working well. The doctors say the steroids are helping me to break down the tumour, but that means it has to go through my system, so being super hydrated helps. I've learned that the faster a tumour grows, the faster it responds to treatment, so the doctors think it's a good thing that we found it when we did.

While all of this was going on I felt very scared but my mummy stayed with me the whole time so I didn’t feel alone. When the doctor from the Royal Marsden (the cancer hospital) came on Friday the 23rd of June and told me I had a very rare form of cancer, I felt heartbroken and as if my whole childhood was over. He told me that I have something called primary T-cell lymphoma and that only adults usually get this cancer. I cried a lot and so did mummy. She got into bed with me and we just cuddled each other. He said that I will have to have special medicines called chemotherapy and that it will last for two and a half years. He was telling us about all of the side effects and what might happen, I felt very scared and sad. I know that I will lose my hair very soon so I have decided to shave it off and donate it to a charity that makes wigs for other children like me. My twin sister wants to shave her head with me too.

I asked the doctor lots of questions and talked to my mummy a lot. The doctor told me that I can't go to school for a long time as I might feel quite poorly and I have to be careful of getting infections. I am worried that mummy can't finish going to university because she will have to stay home and look after me. But I am feeling brave and I know I want to get this cancer out of my body. I have named the tumour Timmy and I have served him an eviction notice, he has outstayed his welcome. I have started my chemotherapy and it has made me get some pains around my body and makes me feel very sick. The nurses have been giving me lots of medicines to help me feel better.

So many people want to help and are offering me presents so mummy has put this page together to ask for your support during the marathon of treatment ahead of us. We really appreciate the support already shown to us and we hope that you will join us for updates as they happen. We will keep posting on here as much as possible to share my progress.

Thank you so much

Rubie Elizabeth Geer. Aged 9 and a half.