Our names are Jacqueline and Will, and Rebecca and Tom. The Hammers are our dear friends, and our 7-year-old sons are great mates with their 7-year-old Vann. Together, we are standing beside them and asking for your support as they face the hardest chapter of their lives.

For Helena and Patrick, life has taken a turn no young family should ever face. When you are just 37 and 38, with a 3-year-old and a 7-year-old, you never imagine your family conversations will include voluntary assisted dying and palliative care. Not the path the Hammers ever thought their story would take.

In December 2023, Patrick was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia. Overnight, life changed. Within hours, with Christmas just around the corner, he was on his way to Brisbane for urgent treatment, and Helena and the boys packed up their lives to follow him.

The Leukaemia Foundation became their home for almost a year. Vann started at a brand-new school in Year 1, Jarvis settled into daycare, and Helena somehow juggled working via telehealth while caring for the boys and Patrick, or visiting him in hospital.

Patrick endured months of inpatient and outpatient chemotherapy, immunotherapy, total body radiation, and a bone marrow (allostem cell) transplant — spending more than 120 days in hospital in that first year. The complications, infections, and setbacks were relentless, yet Patrick faced it all with his trademark easy-going attitude. “Brave” doesn’t even begin to cover it.

100 days post-transplant and in remission, the family finally returned home in late 2024.

But despite being home, Patrick has continued to face ongoing health challenges. After another month in Brisbane hospital in August 2025, his treating teams diagnosed him with a rare post-transplant liver complication — a terminal allo-immune disease. Patrick is unable to receive a Liver Transplant as he would need to be in remission from cancer for five years. Patrick has now been signed off as end-of-life, with a prognosis of within two years.

Around this time, Helena had to make the incredibly difficult decision to pause her thriving private practice, Attune and Bloom. While she had hoped to maintain it, the realities of caring for Patrick and the boys meant she needed to focus fully on her family.

For Helena and Patrick, the focus now is simple but enormous:

• Keeping life as predictable and safe as possible for the boys

• Creating precious memories together as a family

• Managing the daily load of parenting alongside complex medical care

All of this comes on top of what every parent of young children carries — the school and sports runs, the washing piles, the never-ending to-do list — but with the added weight of caring for a very sick husband and preparing for a future without him.

A beautiful young family like this shouldn’t also have to carry financial strain. But the reality is, illness brings added costs: travel, medical expenses, lost income, and the painful necessity of planning for what lies ahead.

Helena and Patrick are proud and private people. Asking for help isn’t something they would ever do, so we are stepping in for them. Your donation will help ease the practical pressures, giving Helena, Patrick, and the boys the gift of more space to focus on what truly matters: holding strong together and making memories.

This year, Team Hammer also took part in the Leukaemia Foundation’s World’s Greatest Shave 2025 . Inspired by Vann’s wish to join last year, the boys dyed their hair in honour of their dad and the friends they made through the Leukaemia Foundation, while Helena and Patrick bravely stepped up to shave. Together, they’ve already raised over $8100…a powerful way to give back to the organisation that carried them through their toughest days, and to help fund vital research and support for other families facing blood cancer.

But now it’s their turn… If you are able, please donate to ease the financial strain and allow Helena, Patrick, Vann, and Jarvis to focus on what matters most …time together. Your support, in any form, will help them create precious memories, give the boys stability, and surround this beautiful family with the love they so deserve.

And as someone wise once said, “If you can’t give financially, you can still give kindness, compassion, or even blood. Every gesture counts.”