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 Aoife Lawless fighting cancer this Christmas.
Meet Aoife Lawless. Doctors suspected Aoife might have a rare condition called neurofibromatosis, or NF1, just after she was born. NF1 can cause tumours on any nerve ending in the body. But the odds of a tumour on Aoife’s optic nerve were slight.
Aoife immediately began to defy those odds. First her specialists confirmed it was NF1. Later they found the optic tumour. But again the odds were so small that you could scarcely wrap your head around it. Believe me, I tried to wrap my head around why any child faces such a struggle so many times.
Then unthinkably, Aoife defied the odds yet again. The tumour on the optic nerve in Aoife’s eye started to grow, and she began to lose her sight.
She wasn’t even five years old when my wife Catherine and I heard the words that turned our family’s whole world upside down. “I don’t like the look of that,” her vision specialist said.
Suddenly that Christmas we were trying to hold ourselves together. Trying to make that holiday the most special it could be for Aoife and her brother Tom. Trying to make every memory matter, while so uncertain for our baby girl’s future.