11/12/2019
Hi All
I asked Dave to create this group for a number of reasons. First and foremost, my family and I would like to thank you all from the bottom of our hearts for your support. Dave and Danny will tell you; it was such a shock to find out about this and how many people are involved. I want you all to know how grateful we are for your generosity.
Please bear with me for the length of this post, I promise they wont all be this long and thanks for taking the time for reading this.
I’m not sure all of you are aware of the full story so ill give you a brief update of what has happened so far.
Luca was not himself at the beginning of the summer holidays, feeling very lethargic and sleeping lots in the day. We took him to the doctors who told us it was a virus. Five days later we were still worried about him so took him back to the GP. The GP agreed something wasn’t right and sent him up to Arrowe park for blood tests straight away. The results were not good and Luca was severely anaemic. The doctors told us there was likely to be a reason Luca was so anaemic and it wasn’t going to be good news. They then sent us to Alder hey in an ambulance late afternoon where we were admitted onto a general paeds ward. Dr Chris (an oncologist) came to talk to us and first mentioned the word Leukaemia. He said Luca would need a bone marrow biopsy first thing in the morning to see what was going on.
The biopsy came back positive for Acute Lymphoblastic leukaemia and we were moved to the oncology ward at Alder hey (ward 3B) to start chemo the next day. From there its been a whirlwind. The first two months we were in hospital more than we were at home. Luca got sepsis and herpes and both meant lengthy hospital stays. He lost lots of weight and had to have a feeding tube fitted that he still needs now.
He has lost all his hair and needs a wheelchair to get around. The last 8 weeks he has had a less intensive chemo regime and he’s doing really well, some of his hair has even started to grow back and he’s been going to school full time.
He starts his intensive chemo on 12th December for 7 weeks so its likely he’ll be quite poorly over Christmas and we will probably be in hospital for a lot of it, the staff and the ward itself are great and spending Christmas there really wouldn’t be too bad at all. He will need some time to recover after this but we are hoping he will be back in school for the last term of year 1 and from April, all being well, he’ll be on a low dose maintenance chemo for 2 and a half years and life hopefully will pretty much return to normal.
As most of you are aware, I am not the kind of person that posts on social media very regularly as I don’t believe in burdening people with my problems. I use it predominantly to let people know things quickly... and to have a nosey at others lol. The second reason for this group is to let you all know about Luca’s progress and where we are all at. Feel free to leave the page at anytime. We won’t be offended at all! I promise to keep posts to a minimum and they will definitely not be as lengthy as this one!
We will be using the money for all of the extra costs having a poorly kid incurs! Car parking charges, petrol, tunnel fares, hospital food, etc. Anything left will be going towards nice days out for Luca (and Caleb!) when he is feeling better and little treats for him when he’s not feeling great or is bored at hospital.
We would like to thank you all again for your amazing generosity and can’t put into words how much you have helped our family and what is means to us!
Thank you all from the bottom of our hearts.
The Simms.
