Hollywood stars Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney have donated £20,000 to help a four-year-old girl battling a rare brain tumour.
The actors – who own Welsh club Wrexham FC together – stepped in after hearing about the plight of little Aria Hodgkiss.
Their generous donations of £10,000 each helped her Go Fund Me account exceed its £60,000 target this weekend.
Aria, from Wrexham, was diagnosed with Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma (DIPG) – an inoperable form of brain cancer that doesn’t respond well to chemotherapy – on her third birthday last year.
The prognosis for those diagnosed with the deadly disease is not good.
Only 40 children in the UK are diagnosed with it each year, and the average life expectancy is just nine months after diagnosis, with only 1% of children surviving five years.
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It currently costs £4,000 a month to pay for the treatment which keeps Aria alive.
But her family hope the fundraiser will help pay for a new cancer drug called ONC201 that could help save her life.
Aria’s mum Melanie first noticed something was wrong in 2020 when her daughter became “really clumsy” and kept “falling over her own feet”.
At the time Aria's paediatrician put her clumsiness down to her being born prematurely or possible cerebral palsy and referred her to physiotherapy.
But by November, Melanie noticed Aria's walking had deteriorated and she was starting to crawl everywhere, before she stopped walking completely by the end of December.
A few months later, Aria's eyes started shaking from side to side and her left eye had turned inwards to her nose.
She was referred to the hospital's ophthalmology department where tests didn't find anything.
But Melanie had a gut feeling something was wrong so pushed to be seen by doctors again.
She explained “I said 'I'm really, really concerned now - something's really not right. She needs an MRI'.”
A scan then revealed a tumour on Aria's brainstem and a very large amount of fluid, leading her to be transferred to Alder Hey Children's Hospital in Liverpool.
"The doctors at Alder Hey didn't know how she was still so active. They said that she shouldn't be this active with the amount of fluid that's in her brain," Melanie said.
Doctors put a shunt in Aria's brain to drain the fluid, which operates constantly to stop any build-up.
But they advised the family to "make memories" while they could, predicting that the young girl had just nine to 12 months to live despite starting a course of radiotherapy.
Although the youngster has already lived longer than experts predicted, the family still hold out hope of finding a breakthrough.
This week Aria will travel to Disneyland Paris which she is “super excited” about.
When she gets back she will have an MRI scan followed by the results on August 30.
“We can only pray and hope that she will be ok,” her family wrote in an update on her Go Fund Me page.
* Make a donation to Aria’s Go Fund Me page here
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