14-year-old diagnosed with brain tumor after symptoms dismissed
Jackie, Max’s mother, explained that her son was on life support for two nights and then taken for an MRI scan, which revealed the extent of his condition.
“We know that it’s terminal because of the size of the mass on the brain,” the 44-year-old mother said, adding, “It’s Stage 4 terminal, they say they can’t remove or shrink the growth.”
“The only thing he had leading up to this was frequent headaches that turned into migraines,” she recalled, adding, “They were there for over a year and we were just fobbed off with ibuprofen.”
After the mother’s statements, in a statement, Hemant Nemade, University Hospitals of Northamptonshire Group Medical Director, shared that, “Our thoughts are with Max and his family at this unimaginably difficult time.
“We are looking into the circumstances of his care with us to establish what happened in order to learn from this.”
Due to the location of the tumor in his brain, he was given the option of chemotherapy by the NHS, but his family is now trying to crowd fund for a treatment in Germany.
“It can’t get any worse. There’s literally nothing that they can do for him in the UK. This is Max’s life,” Jackie said.
In Germany, Max would be able to get vaccines that would attempt to kill the cells of the tumor and slow down their growth.
“It’s almost a personalized vaccine. They take blood from Max, look at the cells, and create a vaccine personalised to Max’s tumor,” Jackie explained. This treatment would involve Max flying out to Germany every couple of weeks to recieve a dose.Continue reading…
