On a warm August evening in 2015, One Direction’s Louis Tomlinson and Liam Payne arrived at London’s Natural History Museum to the sounds of wild teenage screams. They were guests of the “Cinderella Ball”, a fundraising gala hosted by Believe in Magic, an organisation founded to “bring magic” to the lives of terminally ill children. In just two years, Believe in Magic had granted hundreds of wishes to some of the most vulnerable young people in the UK, drawing celebrity endorsement in the process and making a star of its founder – a teenage girl with a brain tumour herself. Or, at least, that’s what young Megan Bhari and her mother Jean had claimed.
At 13, Megan had been diagnosed with idiopathic intracranial hypertension – a build-up of pressure on the brain. She began blogging about treatment and endless hospital appointments, finding a community of other teenagers experiencing much of the same. Believe in Magic was founded when she was 16, shortly after Jean revealed that her daughter’s condition had worsened. The charity grew in status from there – famous people got involved, Harry Styles’s mother joined a 10-day trek up Mount Kilimanjaro that they hosted, while then PM David Cameron praised Megan’s “extraordinary courage”.
