Barretstown is here for families throughout their cancer and other serious illness journey. Our residential camps have a profound effect and lasting impact on our campers and their families. After participating, children go home with increased confidence, self-esteem and more importantly the reassurance that happiness is not just for healthy children. 

Your care and compassion can help children like Jonathan Lennon fighting cancer.

Meet Jonathan Lennon. Jonathan’s diagnosis came only days after he was admitted into the hospital. Large-cell anaplastic lymphoma. A kind of blood cancer.

Crumlin specialist Prof. Aengus O’Marcaigh said Jonathan’s cancer was like standing at the foot of a mountain. Their job was to get him safely over the other side. It was such a shock to us.

Like nearly everyone there is cancer in our families. But your child? You try to
process the words. Cancer… malignancy… lymphoma.

Our Jonathan was about to receive six different types of chemotherapy, over six months, to battle his cancer. Chemotherapy attacks cancer cells and healthy ones, his immune system would weaken. I could scarcely get my head around it.

His doctors were clear about how progressive treatments would get. He may be fine in the first sessions, they said. But as the weeks went on it would take a toll.

It’s so important to me that you come to know our family through my story today, and other families about to live through the same thing.

We’ll remember that visit all our lives. Through six long months of chemotherapy we’d organised every detail of every day, while one of our own was so sick and so weak. But over our heads was this unknowable future for our little boy.

When we turned onto that forested drive into Barretstown, it felt like escaping into a secret world. The wildlife, the way it opens into fields.

I watched the anxious, uncertain faces of the ones I love break into beautiful smiles I hadn’t seen for so long. The children most of all – but even the adults too. Everyone there felt it.

And the cottages you support that we stayed in, they’re joined with a common room in the center. Built to bring children and families together. From that first night we got on like a house on fire with the family staying in the other side of our cottage.

We talked about our journeys. We laughed. The kids played. What a treasure. We still keep in touch with that family today. Caring like yours gave this gift to us.

A reminder that there could be better days ahead. The gift back to a normal family life that we all take for granted. A gift that is so precious.

And I’m so conscious that right now there is another family who stands in our shoes… another family who needs that outpouring of kindness you can give.

Will you fund a magic ticket to Barretstown for a child facing cancer this Autumn?