Myself, Pippa, Jodie, Becky, Chrissie and Adam will be challenging ourselves physically to help raise funds for Avaya's treatment for Neuroblastoma. You can read Avaya's story below, written by her parents.

Myself and Jodie will be doing 100 burpees a day in March and running 50km throughout the month, Pippa will also be doing 100 burpees a day and running an impressive 100 miles throughout the month, Chrissie will also being running 100 km and Becky and Adam will be doing a joint effort with Becky doing 100 burpees a day whilst Adam does 50km of running.

Please donate whatever you can to help Avaya, her family needs to raise £250,000 to open up possibilities for Avaya which sadly the NHS does not offer.

Avaya's Story

'Avaya has always been an energetic, confident, fun little girl. In October 2019 she started to feel unwell, with intermittent symptoms of aches and pains (mainly in her legs, stomach and back), loss of appetite, tired, pale and just generally not herself. After countless trips to the doctors, and a paediatric consultant, on the 20th January 2020 and we received the devastating news that the doctors suspected Avaya was battling Neuroblastoma, a very rare but aggressive childhood cancer. After numerous tests, Avaya was officially diagnosed with stage 4, high risk neuroblastoma. Her primary tumour is located in her abdomen but it has also spread elsewhere in her body, mainly her bones and bone marrow.

Avaya had eight rounds of intense frontline chemotherapy that initially reduced the main tumour by around 50%. However, as the mass was still wrapped around major blood vessels the consultants deemed it was still too dangerous to operate. Following 3 further rounds of a different combination of chemotherapy, her cancer was stable, but had still not shown any improvement.

As frontline treatment did not work as expected and hoped, it is now referred to as refractory neuroblastoma (we like to call it stubborn!!)

Avaya was enrolled onto a clinical trial treatment (Beacon trial) in August. She has now finished this course of treatment and her disease has slightly improved and is deemed stable, but it’s still not enough for the primary tumour to be removed. We are waiting for suggestions of next steps, from experts at a national neuroblastoma panel to see what they can offer Avaya next. But we also need to look at alternative treatments both in the UK and abroad that aren’t covered by the NHS. Unfortunately, these come at a very high financial cost, far beyond our family's means'.