Mum inspired to help by son’s battle with cancer

A HELPING HAND OUR CHARITY PAGES Life saved by new treatment

The mother of a child who narrowly survived leukaemia has spearheaded a campaign to help other cancer sufferers.

Francesca Waite, 51, has led a team to renovated one of the Pilgrims Hospices.

Colleagues of Ms Waite, at Marks & Spencer in Canterbury, agreed to join her after her son Blue Tobin, eight, had survived a particularly aggressive form of the blood cell cancer.

She told the KM Group: We can get on with a normal life and carry on doing what we do to pay back society and the people that helped us in any way we can.

“Its about raising awareness. People don’t realise what these children go through when they are diagnosed with this awful disease.

“Childhood cancer used to be rare but its not now. There are about eight children a day being diagnosed with some form of cancer or other.”

Ms Waite and her 14 colleagues last week renovated the garden area and created a mural at the Canterbury Pilgrims Hospice.

They also redecorated the staff office and kitchen.

It is all part of her wish to help and raise awareness of charities that help cancer sufferers there was not enough money or staff time for members of the hospice to have the work done themselves.

She is the finance and operations manager at the main city centre store at St George’s Street.

It has adopted the children’s cancer group Clic Sargent as its charity of the year.

Ms Waite, from Elvington, and her colleagues there were joined in the three-day renovation by colleagues from the Simply Food branch at Maybrook, Canterbury.

It has directly adopted the Pil- grims Hospices as its charity this year.

The work by the M&S staff in Canterbury stems from their company’s wider Spark Something Good project, offering a total of one million hours of community volunteering by 2025.

It was set off during National Volunteers Week, which finished last Wednesday. Blue, who attends St John’s Primary School in Canterbury was diagnosed with an aggressive form of acute myeloid leukaemia when he was two, in 2011.

He underwent two rounds of unsuccessful chemotherapy before trially a groundbreaking new cancer treatment never before used on children.

It was the potentially fatal chemotherapy cocktail of cyclophosphamide and etoposide and only had a 15% chance of working.

A desperate Ms Waite saw even this as the only way to get him in condition for a bone marrow transplant so she agreed for doctors to carry out.

He was able to get the life-saving bone marrow transplant, arranged through the Anthony Nolan Bone Marrow Register, in May 2012.

A month later he fell into serious illness, nearly dying through unrelated infections.

But he pulled through and last month rang the all-clear bell at the Royal Marsden Hospital on the fifth anniversary of his successful treatment.

Blue and his mother previously lived in Canterbury, from 2009 to 2011, then Ashford and then Elvington, from July 2014.

Blue and his mother Francesca Waite; right, with his sister Kizzy Waite at the bell-ringing ceremony at the Royal Marsden; above, aged three, at the Royal Marsden in 2012Hospital