Meet the mum fundraising £150K to save her cancer-stricken toddler’s life

Sophie Roberts is two years old; a little girl with huge blue eyes and wisps of blonde hair. She likes running around the family home and terrorising her baby brother James. She also has a rare and aggressive form cancer.

“Right now, she’s doing well,” says her mother Ruth. She sounds tired, as you’d expect of any mother with both a toddler and a baby, but she’s coping with far more.

“She’s just had five days of chemotherapy and now she has two days rest at home. We’ll be back in on Friday for some more chemo. She’s tired but she hasn’t been sick yet, which is good. Sometimes it makes her really sick.”

Giving for Sophie

Ruth is sharing these details because Sophie is now gravely ill; the tumours have returned to her liver and lungs. The last chance to save her young life is groundbreaking surgery in the US, but that surgery costs a staggering £230,000.

Family and friends have managed to raise around £80,000, even remortgaging to free up the cash. But that leaves £150,000 to pay if Sophie to make it to specialists in New York for the potentially life-saving operation.

“The team of New York surgeons have said the optimum time to carry out the surgery is within the next few weeks,” explains her mum. That means the family has less than three weeks to raise the vast sum of money.

Donations are trickling in via the dedicated JustGiving page but the ticking clock means the pressure is really on.

Total disbelief

“She’d always had a big tummy as a baby,” Ruth says. “We asked the health visitor and the GP, but they just said that once she started walking she’d lose the fat.

“Well, she started to walk but she didn’t lose her tummy. We took her to the GP in April 2011 but they said her tummy was soft so it was okay. We asked him to listen to her lungs too, because she’d seemed a little wheezy but we were told it was because she’d had a cold.”

Her parents weren’t convinced and in June they took her to a private paediatrician, after feeling something hard in their daughter’s stomach.

Ruth’s voice finally wavers as she describes what happened. “The paediatrician in June didn’t even need to touch her. He just looked at her and said: ‘I think she’s got a tumour in her tummy.’”

How does a parent react to that kind of news? “Total disbelief,” Rush says. “It doesn’t sink in, but you kind of get carried along on a wave of hospital appointments.”

Brave

Sophie has spent many days and nights in hospital, undergoing treatments that an adult would find challenging. So does she understand how poorly she is?

“I don’t think she knows any different,” Ruth says, wearily. “It’s been a year now. She was 18 months when she was diagnosed so the hospital is like her nursery. It’s where she plays with other children and some fantastic toys.

“She has started to notice she doesn’t have hair. She said to me the other day, ‘Your hair’s blowing in the wind, my hair’s not.’”

Normal life

Sophie’s tumours were not the only life-changing events for the family last year. When her daughter was diagnosed, Ruth was in the early stages of pregnancy with the couple’s second child.

She spent the final few weeks of her pregnancy, including the due date, at Sophie’s bedside. Baby James eventually arrived on Sophie’s second birthday.

The family had a cruelly brief period where Sophie’s cancer was in remission. “Six weeks,” says Ruth. “She was in remission for six weeks before it came back. That’s how we know it’s so aggressive.”

“But there were shadows in her lungs. It turned out they were tumours just lying there, waiting to come back. She desperately needs this operation.”

Sophie has been seriously ill for almost a third of her short life. Her family hope that this operation could mean she could finally get the normal life every little girl deserves.

If you’d like to help Sophie, you can make a donation through the family’s dedicated JustGiving page (http://www.justgiving.com/SophieRobertsStory). You can also share your thoughts with other readers in the comments below.