Alfie's Story

My brave brave boy was diagnosed with cancer back in March this year. We came to know of this diagnoses as Alfie started to show some symptoms we had never seen in our time as parents.

These symptoms started to become gradually worse where we knew something was seriously wrong. Alfie was taken to Blackpool hospital on the 19th February 2022 where they told us it was a severe chest infection that needed strong antibiotics to help control it.

The following day a nurse had a feel of Alfie and had found a lump which resulted in a CT scan being done straight away. The results to these were horrifying. Not only did our boy have this 13cm mass covering his chest but he also had a lot of fluid around his heart (pericardial) and a lot filling his walls around his lungs (pleural). We went very quickly to our boys life being at risk and his heart stopping at any given moment.

What felt like hours, we were then put in an ambulance and blue lighted to alderhey where they then told us he was going to be put into intensive care, we couldn’t quite believe it.

The following day (21st February) Alfie was taken down to theatre where we had hours of talks with surgeons that told us our son may not pull through the surgery. It was traumatic. Alfie came out of surgery after 4hrs and would spend the next week recovering on high dependency as he was unable to breathe on his own.

Fast forward to the 1st March 2022 and we had a diagnoses of Tcell Lymphoblastic Lymphoma. An aggressive type of cancer that would ultimately need over 3 years of treatment to fully cure. We’re now 1 year & 2 months into our treatment and it’s pushed us to limits we never knew we had, we’ve seen our child on the brink of death more than once & we’ve watched our families suffer every single day since his diagnoses, especially his little sister Lilly.

Thank you to everyone at BSF for this incredible break away.