Our family has been helped by the The Daily Mirror and Sunday People who have been featuring our story and raising money to fund Nathaniel’s chemotherapy treatment. Today the Sunday People (which is effectively the Sunday Mirror) featured our story again:

EXCLUSIVE: Nathaniel Nabena’s family face a heartbreaking race to find £201,000 for a stem cell transplant before May 12. Without the op his cancer will be terminal . . . We can today reveal that doctors at London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital are so moved by Nathaniel’s plight they have waived their private consultant fees to help. 

And Paul O’Grady, who presents ITV series Little Heroes at the children’s hospital, backs our campaign. 

Nathaniel – a fan of Marvel superheroes – is not entitled to free NHS treatment because he is not a British national. He flew to the UK to have a £5,000 prosthetic eye fitted privately after losing it to a tumour in his home country Nigeria . . . READ THE REST

Read the Rest of Nathaniel Nabena’s story or visit the GoFundMe page

Meanwhile Nathaniel is doing remarkably well. Here you can see him watching Formula 1 this Sunday. Lewis Hamilton is an inspiration to our boy, and it was amazing to spend a normal day watching this dramatic sport and our online church.

Thanks to the generosity of Mirror readers and many others from around the world he was treated with his initial chemotherapy. A few months ago we almost couldn’t have believed that he could ever get this well. Back in February 2021 he was so sick we were told that he wouldn’t be able to travel back to Nigeria. At the time his dad said “I had completely lost hope and was even ready for my son to join the Lord but God showed up when all hope was lost.”

The doctors say that the initial treatment has worked brilliantly. But we have just ten days left to find the funding to moving to the next stage of a stem cell transplant. We are so thankful that Nathaniel has found a match from an umbilical cord donation. Sadly those with a non-white ethnic background only have a 20% chance of finding a good unrelated stem cell donor vs a 69% chance for White Europeans. It feels like we have already passed so many hurdles which seemed impossible. You can imagine our thankfulness to hear that the GOSH doctors are so moved by our Nathaniel’s case that they have all decided to waive their normal professional private fees. He will be treated in the private wing of the hospital but at a much lower cost than first described.

The only barrier to our precious son receiving his life saving treatment is now the hospital and other costs of £200,000. Dare we believe that people will be so generous as to make this possible? The alternative of hospice care and certain death is unbearable to think about.

Previous Mirror articles

• Ten days to save my life (2 May 2021)
• Dad of boy, 9, who needs stem cell transplant to live makes desperate funding plea (2 April 2021). Note that since this article GOSH doctors have very kindly found a way to reduce our funding target significantly!
• Kind-hearted readers help fund boy’s first chemo dose after NHS refuse treatment (6 March 2021)
• New hope for boy, 9, with leukaemia refused treatment on the NHS (22 February 2021)
• Boy, 9, diagnosed with leukaemia in UK denied NHS care unless parents pay £825,000 (14 February 2021)

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