An appeal to raise £1 million for a brave toddler's cancer treatment has already reached the halfway mark in a matter of days. Little Hallie Reeve is battling juvenile myelomonocytic leukaemia at just 20-months-old and needs life-saving treatment not available on the NHS.
Her family are in a race against time to raise over a million pounds so she can have pioneering CAR T-cell therapy in the United States. And since a GoFundMe page was set up ten days ago, more than £530,000 has been raised to help get Hallie the treatment she desperately needs.
Over 32,000 donors have given cash - including six people who have donated £5,000 each - to get the Coventry family past the halfway mark. Hallie was diagnosed with the rare cancer during her first holiday abroad in Spain after a doctor originally dismissed her symptoms as being down to the hot weather.
Within an hour of landing in Malaga, she was rushed to hospital where parents Jamie Reeve, 34, and Kim Dugdale, 29, were given the devastating diagnosis. Hallie has since undergone chemotherapy, blood transfusions and two stem cell transplants at Birmingham's Children's Hospital - but both transplants have failed.
As the NHS won't pay for a third, Jamie and Kim are urgently scraping together cash to fund the expensive therapy only available abroad. It is the same treatment that cured Oscar Saxelby-Lee, the British boy who won the nation's heart after his leukaemia battle went viral in 2018.
Hallie’s auntie Hannah Dugdale,32, said: "If she doesn’t get to America the worst will happen so we need this treatment. Hallie is the sweetest little girl, she’s is so gentle and kind natured, a carbon copy of her mummy, and deserves to be given every chance at a long and happy life."
“She's such a happy little baby, she smiles through everything." JMML is a rare type of chronic blood cancer that slowly develops in young children and has a 50 per cent survival rate if caught early.
Hallie was diagnosed last July after falling ill during the flight to Spain and was "lethargic and limp" by the time they landed. Mum-of-two Hannah added: “They flew to Spain and she screamed the whole flight. She was lethargic and limp when they landed.
"I think they checked into their apartment and took her straight to a hospital in Malaga. Within an hour they had a leukaemia diagnosis. They had only been in Spain a couple of hours. Hallie was just eight-months-old.
"When they were in Spain she was in intensive care for 10 days, she was really quite unwell. She had a private air ambulance to get her home from Spain. They took her straight to Birmingham Children’s Hospital.
"She's had holding chemo to keep her going until she had her first stem cell transplant December of 2022. We found out it failed around the February time and then she went back onto chemo to keep the levels down.
“She had the second stem cell transfer about four weeks ago but we found it failed last week". To donate, visit: .gofundme.com/f/rally-for-hallie
