Please tell your classmates about 'www.meganappeal.com'

There are 13 page headers,

please scroll through them.

Details prior to diagnosis can be found on the page entitled "Child Protection".

Megan was diagnosed in the Newcatle General Hospital at 7.45pm on Friday March 2nd 2001. At that time the brain tumour a Pilocytic Astrocytoma in the Hypothalamic region was a third the size of Megan's brain.

Initially the consultant and doctors at Newcastle General who took over Megan's care had two major things to work on. Firstly to prevent Megan from going into organ failure, at this stage she was only about 4 weeks from dieing due to multiple organ failure, and secondly how to treat what was a very large brain tumour.

Megan within a few days had a Hickman central line inserted and commenced on what was to be a 13 month course of 2 Chemotherapy agents, Vincristine & Carboplatin. Megan also was put on TPN as a feeding process straight into her blood stream to bypass the tumours effect on her eating.

Initially Megan responded well and the tumour shrank by approx 50% by the end of the 13 month course of Chemo.

However in Oct 02 a scan showed the tumour was still cancerous and had grown back to approximately it's original size. Megan then was started on a 6 week intensive course of daily Radiotherapy which ended on 17th Jan 03. This required Megan receiving a general anaesthetic each day to put her to sleep so that she could be perfectly still during the radiotherapy delivery. We were advised that it was extremely risky to deliver radiotherapy as Megan was below the age of 3 yrs old but that it was her only chance of survival and we had to decide to proceeed despite the risks of brain damage. Now that we are a few years on we now know that the delivery of radiotherapy has caused various problems, some severe, due to the damage caused to good parts of Megan's brain.

On two occasions around this time Christmas 02 and Easter 03 Megan had to undergo emergency brain surgery to drain fluid from the ventricals in her brain, this was due to the radiotherapy disolving parts of the solid mass of cancerous tumour into liquid form. To this day Megan still has a device in her head for draining this fluid although it is now redundant as it is out of position due to her growth.

Megan remained in 'remission' for 25 months having MRI scans at 3 monthly intervals, we had started to believe that we may have got through this nightmare ordeal and that Megan was to have her future, until on the 17th Feb 05 a routine scan showed the tumour was back in growth and still cancerous.

Megan underwent brain surgery to try to ressect the tumour on 5th April 05 in Newcastle General Hospital. Initially we believed that the surgery had went well however, Megan suffered post-op seizures and 2 days after surgery lost all sight in her right eye, Megan now only has approx 20% vision in the lower visual field of her left eye.

A scan on June 2nd 05 showed that despite on the day of surgery the surgeon thinking that he had removed approx 80% of the tumour, sadly only 40% had been removed.

At this point we asked for 2nd opinions to determine what was the best way forward and these were given by Alderhey Childrens Hospital in Liverpool and

St. Judes Childrens Cancer Research Hospital in Memphis, USA.

As a result of the opinions we sought Megan is now undergoing a course of Vinblastine Chemotherapy. This is delivered by weekly injection at Newcastle General Hospital.

We have been made aware that this chemotherapy and another 2 which are options for us to try, all only run approximately a 10% chance of cure and therefore are being used to hold the cancer at bay, to allow Megan to recover further from the surgery in April and to allow her more time to creat visual memories.

We have had it made quite clear to us that Megan's only real chance of cure will be if she undergoes at a later stage, radical, major brain surgery, however, again clearly explained to us is that this surgery would be extremely dangerous and highly life threatening and would gaurantee the loss of Megan's remaining sight.

We Megan's family are focusing on each week at a time and we will deal with the decision as to whether we will put Megan through the surgery when we are faced with that decision and not before, a decision we know in reality we will be faced with at some stage soon.

Megan has had 4 operations on her brain and several others to her body, she has now had approx 100 general anaesthetics.

Just after diagnosis in hospital.

Megan has been tube fed for

  over 2 years off and on

  Megan in Radiotherapy

  Jan 03

  Megan after surgery

  April 05