Hope proton therapy will save Harry
SPECIAL TREATMENT AT THE CHRISTIE
A BRAVE schoolboy battling cancer will undergo pioneering proton therapy at The Christie after finally being approved for the treatment on the NHS.
Harry Addy, nine, has been fighting a cancerous ‘pilocytic astrocytoma’ spinal cord tumour since December 2015.
Harry also has leptomeningeal disease in his brain – a rare complication of his cancer in which the disease spreads to the membranes surrounding the brain and spinal cord.
The schoolboy has already undergone two major operations to remove the growth, procedures that meant he had to re-learn how to walk.
He’s also just finished an 18-month stint of weekly chemotherapy.
But at the end of October, Harry and his mum Melanie Elliston Addy, 35, had the heartbreaking news that his tumour has grown.
The youngster will spend six weeks in Manchester undergoing treatment after getting the green light from The Christie’s landmark proton therapy unit. Proton therapy is a type of radiotherapy said to pinpoint tumours with better accuracy while reducing collateral damage to other organs.
The facility at the Christie is the first and only NHS unit of its type.
Harry – brother to Daisy, 11, Matilda, six, and Hattie, three – had previously been denied treatment by the NHS’s proton therapy commissioning panel.
At the time they argued that proton therapy was not appropriate for Harry owing to the complications in his brain.
But because Harry’s diagnosis has changed, he’s now eligible for the treatment. His parents say proton therapy is now their only option to help Harry beat cancer.
Mum Melanie, from Stalham, Norfolk, said: “The funding has been approved for Harry to have protons at The Christie hospital in Manchester.
“And now we need to concentrate on the next step of Harry’s journey.
“Two major surgeries and two-anda-half years of chemotherapy have failed to stop the tumour and leptomeningeal disease in his brain growing. This is our only option left. We are hoping that protons will be successful – although it may fail in the same way past treatments have. But we have to try.”
Melanie says that throughout Harry’s ordeal so far, he’s refused to feel sorry for himself. But the latest news has hit him, and the family, hard.
Melanie has been documenting their plight via Facebook, and in a tearful recent post she revealed: “He’s struggling to get his head round the latest development. He’s emotionally exhausted – the last four years have been a rollercoaster of emotions. He’s getting older and understands more of what everything means.”
Before The Christie’s proton facility opened, NHS patients who needed treatment were sent abroad to locations in Germany and America, at a cost of around £103,000 per patient, according to government figures.