Help fund Kyle’s life saving treatment

#kyleinamillion

For those of you who don’t already know, my wonderful and brave husband Kyle Donnelly was diagnosed with Osteosarcoma (cancer) in August of this year. This is an incredibly rare type of bone cancer that usually and heartbreakingly affects children and teenagers, most commonly in their arms and legs. To put this into perspective, for someone of Kyle’s age, the chance of being diagnosed with this type of cancer is quite literally one in a million!

The way to cure this type of cancer is with chemotherapy and surgery to remove the tumour.

To make Kyle’s case even more unique, his tumour started in his first rib and due to its position, means that successful surgery is going to be very unlikely at this point even with a fantastic response to chemotherapy. Kyle started chemotherapy to try and help shrink the tumour and stop it spreading in September. The type of chemotherapy given for this type of cancer is extremely intense and means that he stays in hospital for around 4-5 days at a time, but so far he has been tackling this like an absolute superhero despite how gruelling and awful it is. I can’t say I am surprised by this, Kyle is a strong, wonderful, kind, loving person and most importantly the most incredible Daddy to his little boys. He will fight this with everything he has and will not stop, but as you can imagine it has been a devastating blow to us all as a family and has altered our lives forever, something that we are still trying to come to terms with.

This brings us onto the only remaining treatment option…

An alternative to surgery for some cancers is radiotherapy, however Kyle’s type of cancer is resistant to the conventional form of radiotherapy that you might be familiar with. This means, for Kyle, standard radiotherapy, or Proton Beam Therapy, will not work as a long term solution…….however there is hope.

A few places in the world have something very special and innovative called Carbon Ion Beam Therapy, to put it simply this is a much more effective version of radiotherapy or Proton Beam Therapy for radio resistant tumours and has the potential to cure him! The UK does not have Carbon Ion Beam therapy, it is very expensive and difficult to build these facilities so there are only a handful of them in the world. Kyle has been accepted for treatment at a facility in Austria. Hooray!

Unfortunately, even though Kyle’s oncologist agrees that this would be a good treatment option for Kyle, they have been very honest with us and explained that as it is not something currently on the NHS approved funding list, the NHS won’t fund his treatment, so we need to pay for this ourselves.

Many people have asked if they can help us with this so we have set this up so that they and anyone else who wishes to help us raise the funds to save Kyle can. The treatment to self fund is £70,000. Gofundme take fees so a little over this would be wonderful if we are lucky enough to get that far.

If you can help, we thank you so much from the bottom of our hearts, if not, that’s ok, but we would ask that you read up on this type of cancer via the bone cancer research trust website (link below) and spread the word on signs and symptoms of this awful disease. It might just save you or your children’s life.

https://www.bcrt.org.uk/information/?gclid=Cj0KCQiApb2bBhDYARIsAChHC9sWUUIlG6odcWeyjhxa3-1JqLylwaGc8AtbFgv1t2e8nmRoxfNopRMaAtU2EALw_wcB

If anyone wants to get involved with fundraising for Kyle’s treatment please use the hashtag below so we can make sure this is shared as much as possible.

#kyleinamillion