NEW handbag, or help a Londonderry family hold it together financially while having their son’s brain tumour treated?
Ashley Sherry, the stepmother of Londonderry woman Allison Douglass, hopes to pass the hat around to Hawkesbury residents to help the Douglass family make ends meet. She started a ‘mycause’ crowdfunding campaign to make it easy for everyone to help.
Hoping to reach $5000, they have stalled for the moment at $3000.
The family of four had been renting at Glossodia, but found they could not afford it and moved back in with Allison’s mum at Londonderry. Not long after, Allison and husband Josh’s son Levi Douglass, 6, was diagnosed with a craniopharyngioma. Allison found she had to leave her job to look after him.
Allison has to sleep with Levi to watch him for seizures. He had a violent one last July but hasn’t had one since operations to ‘debulk’ the tumour, which is wrapped around his pituitary gland.
Now he’s about to start six weeks of targetted radiotherapy at Sydney Children’s Hospital at Randwick, a 2.5-hour trip through peak-hour traffic each day, and a $27 parking cost. He has to have general anaesthetic each day as he can’t move a muscle while the 20-minute treatment takes place.
Levi’s situation was reported in the Gazette in September last year as Allison wanted other parents to know the symptoms he experienced with his tumour. He’d originally started vomiting randomly, having cold shivers, finding it hard to concentrate, his eyesight was deteriorating and his speech wasn’t developing. It took months for him to be diagnosed.
Now, he’s legally blind though he can still see up to six metres out of one eye. He can get around the house easily enough but needs a hand outside it. He attends kindergarten at Hobartville but hasn’t been for four weeks and will now miss it for another six weeks during his treatment.
If you’d like to help the Douglass family, go to mycause.com.au and search for Levi Douglass.