Irish blogger Yavanna Keogh, better known to most as MakeUpMonster, has shared the heartbreaking news that her little boy has been diagnosed with terminal cancer.
Yavanna, who will be stepping away from her blog for the duration 2018 in a bid to spend as much time with her son as possible, has opened up about the tragic news.
In a devastating post, she began, “I would give anything not to be writing these words.
“Just over a week ago we were told Oscar, our beautiful, talented, clever, unique three and a half year old has a brain tumour.”
She revealed that her son has a very rare, incurable tumour called DIPG (Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma), which affects only three or four children in Ireland each year.
“Somehow it had found Oscar. It had sat there stealthily growing while we went about our normal lives, making plans, having fun, and then delivered small flashes of its intention, so subtle we had no idea of their meaning,” she wrote.
“What do we do, that was all I could think, how do we fix it. A brief flash of chemo and sickness and hard times flashing through my head was suddenly altogether unimportant in the grand scheme of things. But then came his final blow to us. You can’t cure it.
“It most often strikes children and it is devastating, with an almost 0% survival rate. Where it was, the type of insidious, aggressive tumour it was meant there was no fix.
“We stared at him in utter disbelief, two words eventually just hanging there between us. How long. He simply said between a couple of months and a couple of years.
“And Oscar, our son, sitting in the middle of it with no idea of what was happening. So here we are. Caught in quite simply hell.”
Despite the treatments he can and will undertake, she reveals the “tumours nearly always grow back.”
She continued, “The median survival for this type of brain tumour is less than a year, with less than 1% of children surviving to 5 years.”
Yavanna has since set up a GoFundMe page to raise money for her son and to make memories. She is also be donating money to Irish charities.
To donate to the cause, click here.